“Another is this soft, Gaelic phrase ‘rionnach maoim’, the shadows that clouds cast on moorland on a windy day. He describes two of his favourites: “One is this lovely Cornish word ‘zawn’, which means a wave-smashed chasm in a sea cliff – it’s so evocative of that gaping mouth, and the power of those places,” he says. They all describe aspects of weather, nature and terrain – and many of them are dying out, slipping out of conversation and off the tongues of those who once spoke them.
In Landmarks, Macfarlane pulls together nine glossaries of terms taken from 30 languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain and Ireland. “The book is about all of us finding ways to celebrate and enrich the language that we have for landscape and nature.” “I’m talking to you from my edge-of-the-suburb house in Cambridge – most people are in cities now,” he says.
Similarly, he doesn’t believe that the words he has collected in Landmarks are just for shepherds or hill-walkers. This is a man who has found peregrine falcons at a power station and water voles at a municipal dump, claiming in his 2007 book The Wild Places that “the human and the wild cannot be partitioned”. Macfarlane is in the kitchen of his home in Cambridge, also clinging to a patch of reception. I am sitting in my car at a rest stop next to the river Wye in Wales, opposite public toilets, trying to stay still to keep my mobile from cutting out. We speak on the phone the day before he is due to talk at the Hay Festival. In his latest book Landmarks, the British naturalist calls for “a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen”.
But he is also a magician, of sorts – one who weaves spells using lost phrases that recall a different connection with our landscape. Robert Macfarlane is a compiler of words: an explorer of hedgerows and roadsides, salt marshes and sea-caves.
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