In my final book of 2020 I continued my journey through the works of Robert Macfarlane. That I should end the year in his company seems right in some way because he has been a delightful and consoling companion at various times in a year none of us will forget.

Ghostways brings together in a single, slim volume two essays previously published separately. Holloway first appeared in 2012 and Ness in 2018, with words by Robert Macfarlane and illustrations by Stanley Donwood. Both are works that defy categories. Ness is a prose-poem, a kind of elegy or lamentation inspired by Orford Ness, a ten-mile spit of shingle in eastern England where, for some seventy years or more, the British government tested deadly weapons in strict secrecy. Holloway tells of journeys in Dorset made by Macfarlane and his friends in 2004 and 2011 to find one of the ancient, sunken paths (hollow ways) that can be found carved into the soft landscape of Britain. “A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll, and rain-run have harrowed into the land”.

As in other books he has written, the sense of place is strong in Ghostways, the experience of place not as something “out there” but as a realm in which a person can travel and slip – from one moment to the next – from the present into the past or the future. Language isn’t just how such experiences are communicated to oneself and others, but integral to the experiences themselves. Words are more than words, places are more than places. To experience is to express, and to express is to experience. In movement we encounter language, and in word-making we effect movement and change in the world. Places, like words, are vulnerable to loss, but both can be recovered with care and with sensitivity to our lived experience. Ghostways is a powerful and affecting hymn to the vulnerability of our world, and a strange and gentle reminder to us all to live in it fully and sensitively.