Robert Macfarlane (writer) - The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012)

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Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete—and these are substances not easily impressed.

Robert Macfarlane
Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand

Robert Macfarlane
As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.

Robert Macfarlane
I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.

Robert Macfarlane
The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

Robert Macfarlane
Knowing another is endless,' Shepherd had written; 'The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

Robert Macfarlane