Where to Start with Robert Macfarlane: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Robert Macfarlane — whether to begin with Underland, The Old Ways, or Mountains of the Mind. A complete reading guide to the nature writer.
By Natalie Osei
Robert Macfarlane (born 1976) is the British writer whose Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), and Underland (2019) have established him as the most important voice in contemporary British nature writing and one of the finest prose stylists working in English today. Macfarlane writes about landscape, deep time, language, and the relationship between the human and non-human worlds with a precision and beauty that has expanded the readership for nature writing far beyond its previous boundaries. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; his academic background in literature inflects every page of his outdoor writing.
Where to Start: Underland (2019)
The essential Macfarlane — and the book that best demonstrates his full range. Underland is structured around descents: into the Yorkshire cave system of Mendip, into the catacombs beneath Paris, into the fungal underworld of a Norwegian forest, into the ice caves of a Greenlandic glacier, into the repository being built in Finnish bedrock to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years.
Each descent is rendered with extraordinary physical specificity — the cold, the dark, the particular textures of different kinds of stone and ice — and each opens into a larger meditation. The Paris catacombs become a meditation on what cities bury. The fungal networks (the ‘wood wide web’) become a meditation on communication and connection across species. The nuclear repository — designed to last longer than recorded human history — becomes a meditation on what we are leaving our descendants and how we might communicate with them across a timescale too large for normal human language.
Macfarlane’s prose is the book’s most immediate pleasure: careful, specific, capable of moving from the geological to the personal without losing either register. Underland is both a great work of nature writing and a great work of contemporary prose.
The Old Ways (2012)
Macfarlane’s landscape masterpiece — ancient paths as connections across time. His most directly lyrical book and the one that established his reputation.
Reading Robert Macfarlane
Begin with Underland — it is his most complete and most emotionally ambitious work. Read The Old Ways for his more intimate, lyrical mode. His other books (Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, Landmarks) are all strong and can be read in any order.
For the full Robert Macfarlane bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Robert Macfarlane author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Robert Macfarlane?
Underland (2019) is the most widely recommended starting point for new readers — Macfarlane's journey into underground spaces (caves, catacombs, deep-time geology, nuclear waste repositories) as a meditation on what lies beneath the surface of the world and what we bury there. His most ambitious and most emotionally resonant book; the one most likely to turn occasional readers into devoted followers. The Old Ways is the alternative for readers who prefer the landscape writing over the more speculative geological deep time.
What is Underland about?
Underland is structured as a series of descents — into a Yorkshire cave system, into the catacombs under Paris, into the fungal networks under a Norwegian forest, into a Greenlandic glacier, into the cavern being prepared as a repository for Finland's nuclear waste. Each descent is physical but also metaphorical: what we bury, what we refuse to look at, what we pass to our descendants, what remains in the dark. Macfarlane's prose is among the most beautiful in contemporary British nonfiction.
What is The Old Ways about?
The Old Ways (2012) follows Macfarlane walking ancient paths — chalk downland tracks, pilgrimage routes, sea paths, mountain ways — in Britain and beyond. The book argues that the act of walking old paths is a form of connection with all those who walked them before; that landscape carries history in its surfaces. More directly lyrical than Underland; the book that established Macfarlane's reputation as the leading voice in British nature writing.
Is Macfarlane's writing suitable for readers who don't enjoy outdoor activities?
Macfarlane is a writer first and a walker second. His books are primarily literary and philosophical engagements with landscape and deep time; the physical journeys are the occasion for thought rather than the point. Readers who have no interest in mountaineering or walking as activities have found his books consistently engaging because what he is really writing about is attention, language, time, and the relationship between human consciousness and the non-human world.
