This summer I’ve been captured by three stories in particular. All have been caught up with the landscapes I reside in—particularly how memory seeps into my surrounds, bleeding and blending the lines between the literary and the literal. Books about landscape associate the external with the internal world, back and forth, one reinforcing the other. I can look out from the verandah to see the refractions of these tales, the memories I have created in the land, and the history of the country in which I live.

The first of these tales is Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places. The book explores the way we relate to environment by beading together a series of memoirs about ‘wild places’. Macfarlane visits Rannoch Moor, the southern Holloways, Loch Coruisk, and other nooks and crannies safe (for now) from human industry, all the while battling to define the term ‘wild’, and reflecting on what actions these wild places provoke in us. At the book’s opening, Macfarlane asks friends to send him beloved places they have visited, hoping to construct a ley-line of sites to visit in a nature pilgrimage. Having made his list, he constructs a journey through many corners of the British Isles. He visits lochs, mountains, rivers, moors, forests and tors, observing the particular reactions these ‘wild’ spaces call forth from the often-untapped regions of the body and mind. As he journeys, he creates a cartography of land and culture, a symbiosis between physical and mental maps, of inner and outer worlds.