The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane: review For 237 pages I was not sure exactly what. The core of the work consists of half-a-dozen specific walks in different parts of the world, often physically very demanding, remembered in intense detail and often exquisitely described. It is overhung, though, by the intermittent presence of a spectral walker from the past - the poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in the First World War and who was perhaps the inspiration of the most famous of all walk-poems, Robert Frost's The Road not Taken. Macfarlane acknowledges the examples of many other men of the open road - Wordsworth, Borrow, Stevenson, WH Hudson, John Muir, Hilaire Belloc, Laurie Lee, Henry Williamson of Tarka the Otter, Bruce Chatwin of The Songlines. It is the Welshman Thomas, though, who chiefly haunts the The Old Ways, and whose own complex responses to life as to landscape, it seems to me, give to this book some of its sad dignity - for there is something sweetly sad to the feel of it, and it ends indeed with the story of Thomas taking the more fateful of Frost's alternative routes, to find his death in Flanders. But still, as I read on from one journey to another, by way of many compelling sidetracks - portraits of individuals, thoughts about geology or folklore, now a ghostly experience in Sussex, now 5,000-year-old footprints in Lancashire - still I felt I had somehow not got the hang of the thing. Thomas's presence is fitful, and the book's construction seemed to me too contrived, until I reached page 238, and read the following words: "'Choose three books from the library," said Miguel, gesturing around the hot room. The first will tell your past, the next knows your present and the last will see your future."" Miguel Ángel Blanco, Macfarlane tells us, has in his Madrid basement a library of more than a thousand book-boxes, each containing, not a book, but an object collected on a particular walk - a crystal of quartz, seaweed, a feather, a leaf, a snakeskin, an acorn cup. It is a library of his journeys, a memory-stack, a record of many years of wandering, thinking, wondering and watching. And at once, when I read about it, I realised that the nature of Miguel's Biblioteca del Bosque was the nature of The Old Ways, too - a stack of drawers, to be pulled out at random if you like, but constituting, in their immense store of memories and reflections, a grand cohesive whole, and a true link in themselves between the walker and the walk, reality and imagination. Señor Blanco invited Mr Macfarlane to use his library as a divining instrument, telling the past, knowing the present, forecasting the future. I respond in rather the same mystic way to The Old Ways, after a week's immersion in its influence. It has made me feel that I myself am always walking some eternal track, sharing its pleasures and hardships with uncountable others, treading its immemorial footprints, linking me with all the generations of man and beast, and connecting in particular the visionary author of the book, as he unrolls his sleeping bag beneath the stars, with this bemused reviewer beside the fire at Llanystumdwy. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Robert Macfarlane Hamish Hamilton, £20, 409pp Read on 1 The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane (2007). 2 The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (1986). 3 West: A Journey through the Landscapes of Loss by Jim Perrin (2010).