Dyffryn Mymbyr in Wales, a chilly hotbed of poetic literature (Image: Peter Marlow/Magnum)
VOCABULARY is an ever-changing terrain, reshaped by tongue and trends, just as the elements and town planners reconfigure the landscape of Britain. And the relationship between place and name, argues Robert Macfarlane, is deep-rooted and undervalued.
鈥淟anguage is fossil poetry,鈥� he writes, quoting 19th-century US essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Landmarks is a project Emerson would have recognised: a 鈥渨ord-hoard鈥�. It attempts to preserve language and use it to pull us closer to our surroundings. This hoard is needed because specialised vocabularies are being burned off by apathy and urbanisation, says Macfarlane. In the mouths of the unimaginative, he reasons, generic language is shaping a 鈥渂landscape鈥�.
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鈥淪pecialised local vocabularies are being burned off by apathy and urbanisation鈥�
Landmarks serves as a convivial field guide to the authors who have inspired Macfarlane鈥檚 magnificent writing: eco-philosophers such as John Muir, Roger Deakin and Nan Shepherd figure strongly. It has glossaries brimming with regional colloquialisms, from the poetically exact 鈥渁mmil鈥� 鈥� a term for the sparkle of morning sun through hoar frost 鈥� to the bawdy 鈥渨ind-fucker鈥�, a kestrel.
The tenth glossary is left playfully blank, hungrily awaiting future words, because Macfarlane is no doom-monger. Words, he says, 鈥渁ct as a compass to sing [the land] back into being鈥�.
An ecologist, linguist and academic, Macfarlane is not above admitting his infatuation with Britain鈥檚 diverse landscape. 鈥淣ature does not name itself,鈥� he writes. 鈥淟anguage is always late for its subject. Sometimes on top of a mountain I just say, 鈥榃ow鈥�.鈥�
In The Fish Ladder, her first book, Katharine Norbury cannot afford to be so ingenuous. How truthfully she writes will determine whether her series of river walks from sea to source will be seen as a sufficiently heroic quest.
Her project is driven by her miscarriage and subsequent depression, making this a book as much about grief and motherhood as about landscape.
There are moments of quiet drama, such as her waking on moorland to find a stag standing over her. Still, her journeys are not epic. She acknowledges the semi-industrial nature of her surroundings. Those fish ladders, for instance, are structures that allow fish to bypass dams, leaping barriers on the way to their spawning grounds. They allow salmon and hydroelectricity to co-exist.
Less happily, there is something touristic about her fleeting visits, and their meaning is occasionally overthought, as in 鈥渢he fact we鈥檇 brought sandwiches seemed significant, somehow indicative of a need for self-sufficiency鈥�. She is only ever passing through.
The Fish Ladder is a valuable addition to the contemporary nature-memoir canon 鈥� although Norbury鈥檚 life of second homes and Latin family mottoes highlights the irony that so few of today鈥檚 memoirs about the natural world are written by those who work such harsh, remote lands.
Hamish Hamilton
Bloomsbury Circus
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭ied to the land鈥�
