Robert Macfarlane

Interviewed by John Greeves

A book born of a place

In 2012, I was able to interview Robert Macfarlane about his encounters with these ancient sunken pathways, many of which have become hidden or mislaid like this recently uncovered interview.

Robert Macfarlane, is a well-known British travel writer and naturalist. He is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, which include: The Mountain of the Mind (2003), The Old Ways(2012), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words(2017) and Underland (2019). His books have received including the Guardian His first book was award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In later times he has won numerous awards including The Wainwright Prize 2019, The Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award (2020) as well as being shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020. Holloway (2012) is perhaps one of his lesser of Robert Macfarlane lesser known books and was co-authored with Dan Richards and illustrated by Stanley Donwood, (the renowned artist of the Radiohead record covers). It's a slender book, beautifully crafted and illustrated with a text which captures the escapades of Robert Macfarlane and his two companions who explored ancient holloways in South Devon. The word ‘holloway’ is not to be found in the OED, the word comes from the Anglo Saxon hol wegand refers to a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of footfall, hoof hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock. The word ‘holloway’ is not to be found in the OED, the word comes from the Anglo Saxon hol weg and refers to a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of footfall, hoof hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock. These paths lie below the level of the fields through there constant passage of human and animal traffic. ‘They are landmarks that speak of habit,’ as Macfarlane puts it, some being 20 ft deep and more like ravines than lanes, overgrown by the adjacent trees, so they appear as green roofed tunnels, enclosed in a timelessness. This short book records two visits to the hills of Chideock in Dorset, a land bookended by Hardy’s Wessex and John Fowles at Lyme Regis. In the first trip Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog, go in search of the ‘holloway’ mentioned in the classic thriller Rogue Male. The book by Geoffrey Household recounts a tale of the hero who takes refuge in a deep holloway. Later, Robert wrote about it in TheWild Placesand Roger Deakin in his Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.Sadly Roger died the summer after the trip.

Six years later, after Deakin’s early death, Robert Macfarlane returned to the holloway with artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The weather was an array of bright white mists, monsoon rains, buffeting autumn gales and sunshine. The small party spent two days following the holloways on bicycle and foot and began their journey on Pilsden Pen, an Iron Age Hill Fort. The first half is written by Robert and the second half by Dan, telling the story of these two journeys. The book emulates the echoic nature of the holloway, capturing its various nuances in a canopy of poetic prose. It’s illustrated beautifully throughout by Stanley, with many drawings taking over two thousand overlapping pencil strokes to encapsulate the holloway. The original small book was hand-pressed by the printer Richard Lawrence. 277 original copies, (the same metric height of Pilsden Pen, the Iron Age hill-fort) were first produced. Then Faber proposed republishing Holloway in a hardback edition. This slender book is unique in several ways; it’s a true labour of love involving a myriad of words, voices and images, a wonderful book born of place and one I was anxious to ask Robert more about.

Q1. What would you like readers to take away from this book Robert?

A sense of the mystery that certain landscapes hold; an idea of the strangeness and wildness that even apparently familiar places can still contain.

Q2. What thoughts go through your minds as you walk these ancient paths? Can you give an example?

Ancient paths - old ways, holloways, pilgrim paths, Neolithic tracks - have all been brought into being by the footfall (and wheel-roll) of many previous walkers. As I walk such routes I'm fascinated, like many people I think, by the awareness of these previous walkers, but also by the impossibility of knowing who might have passed that way before. There is also, of course, the combination of the ancient and the immediate: you might be walking a path which was first followed five thousand years previously, but the birdsong that is pouring down onto you from a skylark, or the weather blowing across you, is of the pure present.

Q3. Did you feel you flushed out by a strange past and if so what was it?

Ah, well now we get onto the specific strangenesses and enigmas of the book itself, and the several stories it (rather obliquely) tells. Certainly, we were flushed out by a strange past (a lovely way of putting it). Or, as one reader expressed it to me after reading the book, "I'm not quite sure what happened and I expect you aren't either, but you certainly disturbed what was concealed." The strange past? Well, whatever it was, it has something to do with the Chideock valley's peculiarly repetitive histories of fugitives (from Catholic martyrs to English aristocrats), and with the odd space of the holloway, itself brought into being by repetition (those feet falling over the centuries, grooving it into the ground, and making of it a kind of den).

Q4. This book is a collaboration with its writing, illustration and making. To what extent has the collaborative work added to the encounter with the book?

To me, it was a huge pleasure and privilege to collaborate: with one of the great letterpress printers of the country (Richard Lawrence, who cast and set the type from fresh lead for the original edition of the book, and then handprinted it); with one of the great artists of the country (Stanley Donwood, who exhibits internationally and on whom Tate Modern are publishing a big book next year); and with a terrific young writer called Dan Richards, full of energy and originality in person and on the page, who really caused the whole curious affair to come to pass. It seemed, too, appropriate to work collaboratively on a book about a landmark (the holloway) which had itself been made by many people.

Q5. To what extent are holloways a metaphor for life? The idea of 'life' as a way or path is surely one of the oldest - and most culturally widespread - metaphors for existence, there from AngloSaxon through to Buddhism. I'm not sure holloways really refine that notion any further.

Q6 The writing in the second part is more oblique, the narrative less defined. How should the reader in your opinion view this? The second part is written by Dan, and takes the form of something more like prose-poems, compared to the compressed - but still narrative - first half, written by me. We wanted echoes to be set up between the pages and between the parts, with the reader finding his or her way through the overlapping branches of the book, as it were - further in to mystery, rather than towards clarification. This is not a guidebook to the green lanes of Dorset; it is a slim and intricate attempt to catch at, but not pin down, something of the complex magic of the holloway and places like it.

Thank you Robert

‘Few holloways are now in use; they are too narrow and slow to suit modern travel, too deep to be filled in and farmed over. They exist -- but cryptically’, Robert maintains in his book. They have thrown up their own defences and disguises to the modern day, guarded now by nettles and brambles at their entrances, with the topmost branches bent to form a leafy tunnel of concealment that awaits our discovery.

Holloway By Robert Macfarlane Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards Published by Faber ISBN 978-0-571-30271-0

John Greeves is a creative writing tutor. He originally hails from Lincolnshire. He gained a Masters degree at Cardiff University and previously worked at Sussex University.

When he’s not teaching for Continuing and Professional Education, he writes poetry, short stories and features, and runs the occasional workshop.