Where the wild things are

Robert Macfarlane

Granta, 18.99

I SHOULD confess at the outset, that despite growing up in the rural Borders, I am by nature a city person. The structure of wynds, vennels and pends makes sense to me, whereas tors, grykes and cloughs seem utterly incomprehensible. So when I say that Robert Macfarlane's glorious book, The Wild Places, made me physically yearn for the wild places he visited, that this is something of a Damascene conversion. If he can re-tune the sensibilities of an inveterate urbanite like me, he must be doing something very special indeed.

The central conceit of the book is simple. Macfarlane set out to explore the last remaining wild places of Britain. In opposition to the "meshwork of motorways", he sought out the forgotten woods, moors, marshes and mountains that are left off the usual maps. This journey took him from the Atlantic island of Ynys Enlli to Rannoch Moor, from the summit of Ben Hope to the holloways of Dorset and from the western headland of The Burren in Ireland to the "desert" of Orford Ness in East Anglia.

It is a journey in more than just a geographical sense. Macfarlane began by wanting to find in the wilderness a place where he might "step outside human history". He imagines it as being "boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities". Macfarlane's previous book in this genre was the much acclaimed Mountains Of The Mind; and his first instinct is to look for the "untouched" in vertiginous peaks and inaccessible apexes.

Two changes, however, occur in his thinking. First, he realises that it is very difficult - and perhaps even wrong - to try to escape the human. It is not a matter solely of the persisting pollution, the plastic washed up on distant shores. The empty places are often emptied places: the clearances in the Highlands and the famine in Ireland create these oases of the uninhabited. As Macfarlane writes, concerning the snow hares of the Peak District, "this is the paradox of their presence in the Peak: they have become for many people, including me, a sigil of wildness; but their presence here is entirely a consequence of human management".

Second, under the tutelage of the late Roger Deakin, Macfarlane comes to appreciate that wildness might be found in humbler landscapes than the austere and dramatic northern fastnesses. He learns that a hedgerow has immensities equal to a Munro, that a turlough (a temporary lake in a limestone valley) might be every bit as remarkable as Cape Wrath.

This humility infuses the narrative. Macfarlane eschews the slightly strident tone taken by many environmentalists, although his judiciously placed facts speak volumes: glow-worms, for example, are in decline because the sodium glare of our streetlights outshines the phosphorescence they use to attract a mate. He does not underestimate the formidable dangers to our ecology, but does not lapse into apocalyptic pessimism. Rather, a sense of the enduring persistence of nature comes through again and again. It's ironic that one of the "wildest" places now is Chernobyl, where silver birches line the streets and six-foot catfish swim in the cooling ponds of the reactor. It seems to bear out Hugh MacDiarmid's haunting line from 'On a Raised Beach' - "there are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones".

Macfarlane opens the book with an account of climbing a beech tree; and it would be easy - and wrong - to romanticise him as a skinny-dipping, outdoor-sleeping, night-rambling child of nature. In fact, his day job is as a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and he has also written the exceptionally good Original Copy: Plagiarism And Originality In Nineteenth-Century Literature.

The book is not a retreat, but rather to create a kind of rapprochement between the cultural and the natural. It is a bookish book, divagating on Sorley MacLean, Ivor Gurney, WH Auden and George Orwell, as well as a host of lesser-known and truly fascinating writers. He has an astonishing cadenza on "monadists" - those who incessantly find repeated shapes in nature - covering the wave-obsessed Vaughan Cornish, the spiral-finding D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson and the quincunx-orientated Sir Thomas Browne. He draws in painters, map-makers, mystics and poets.

As well as being erudite on literature, The Wild Places is an eloquently literary read in its own right. Macfarlane's prose sings beautifully. He relishes the specific words for natural phenomena - holloways are also bostels, grundles and shutes, valleys are also arroyos. Scientific and geological vocabulary is effortlessly segued into his own lucid style. The book is punctuated with remarkable similes: not just in their visual acuity but in their poetic resonance. When he picks up a sheep's skull, "water streamed from its ragged nose-holes in sudden liquid tusks". He notices that grains of sand are sickle-shaped, "like a cuticle", and describes how "chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their colour-rhyme in the eye-ring of a blackbird".

The Wild Places will no doubt receive many plaudits, and deserves to win prizes. It is powerful, poetic and humane - but perhaps the greatest praise I can give it is to reveal that I have bought a pair of walking boots.

Main Theatre, Friday, 1.30pm www.edbookfest.co.uk