Landmarks

Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather.

Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

This joyous meditation on land and language is a love letter to the British Isles.' Observer

'Lyrical, charged with a monumental strength. Surely no one since the young Ted Hughes has written about British landscape and wildlife with such fierce enthusiasm. Few writers today have such power to make you look afresh at the familiar . . . making a British countryside come alive as the most exotic place on earth.' Daily Express

'A must-read for anyone interested in the literature of the British countryside.' James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life

'Astonishing and revelatory. Please read Landmarks, encounter its wonderful words, let them open your mind . . . start looking at the world in the dazzlingly receptive way they have taught you.' Adam Nicolson, Spectator

'As teeming and complex as an ecosystem, rawly moving, enormously pleasurable, historically important and imaginatively compelling, elegant and scholarly.' Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

'Passionate and magical...A deep scholarship of the countryside with an adventurous approach, all rendered in immaculate, delicious prose. Macfarlane offers an enriched nature. A kind of manual of how people in love with place and language are created by landscape.' Horatio Clare, Daily Telegraph

'Extraordinary, remarkable, truly brilliant. A field guide to the ways we can speak and write about the land.' Big Issue

'So important, enriching. Ought to be read by policymakers, educators, armchair environmentalists and active conservationist the world over.' John Burnside, Guardian