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.
Why Underland Is the Ideal First Book
For a reader new to Robert Macfarlane, Underland is a superb first book because it is among his most acclaimed and ambitious works and a full expression of his distinctive gifts, the combination of profound nature and landscape writing with deep learning, lyrical prose, and a searching engagement with time, place, and the human relationship to the earth. Underland takes the reader into the worlds beneath our feet, the caves, catacombs, underground rivers, and buried landscapes that lie below the surface, and through this exploration it meditates on deep time, on what we bury and what endures, and on the human relationship to the earth. As an entry point, it offers a full and powerful expression of Macfarlane’s gifts, the lyrical and precise prose, the deep learning worn lightly, and the profound engagement with landscape, time, and meaning. It welcomes the newcomer with its fascinating subject, its beautiful writing, and its profound reflection, drawing the reader into a journey both literal and meditative. It is among his most acclaimed works and a fine representation of his achievement, so that the new reader encounters Macfarlane at his most powerful. For the newcomer, then, Underland is an excellent starting point.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect Underland to be a profound and beautifully written work of landscape exploration and meditation, taking you into the worlds beneath the surface and reflecting on deep time, memory, and the human relationship to the earth. You can expect lyrical and precise prose, for Macfarlane is one of the finest prose stylists writing about landscape and nature, and his writing combines beauty with exactness. You can expect deep learning worn lightly, for Macfarlane brings to his subject a rich knowledge of history, language, science, and myth, woven gracefully into his narrative. You can expect a fascinating subject, the hidden worlds beneath our feet, the caves, catacombs, and buried landscapes, explored both literally and as occasions for reflection. You can expect profound meditation, on deep time, on what endures and what we bury, on the human relationship to the earth and to the future. Expect, in short, a profound, beautifully written work of landscape exploration and meditation, a rich and rewarding introduction to Macfarlane’s distinctive nature writing.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once Underland has introduced you to Macfarlane’s landscape writing, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore his other acclaimed works, which continue his profound engagement with landscape, place, language, and the human relationship to the natural world. His other books explore walking ancient paths and the meaning of the ways we travel through landscape, the relationship between mountains and the imagination, and the language we use for the natural world, all in his characteristic combination of lyrical prose, deep learning, and searching reflection. Reading these after Underland deepens your appreciation of Macfarlane’s distinctive gifts, the beautiful prose, the deep learning, and the profound engagement with landscape, place, and meaning that run through his work. His recurring concerns, the human relationship to landscape, the meaning of place, the language of nature, and the perspective of deep time, run through his books, and the reader who has been moved by Underland will find them developed across his work. Building your reading journey through Macfarlane’s work is a matter of following his profound landscape writing from one acclaimed book to the next. The reader who begins with Underland and continues through his work will encounter one of the finest landscape and nature writers of our time.
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.
