LANDMARKS

A Sunday Times number one bestseller here in Penguin paperback, the book is a joyous meditation on words, landscapes and the relationship between the two. Words are ingrained into our landscapes, and landscapes are ingrained into our words. 'Landmarks' is about the power of language to shape our sense of place, a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Macfarlane's delicious prose is passionate and magical, a deep scholarship of the countryside with an adventurous approach and a fascinating lexicography at the same time. For example under Pools, Ponds and Lakes did you know that a pulk is a small dirty pool in Essex dialect, or a plash in Cotswolds, a mardle in Suffolk or a lochan in Gaelic? Use as a phrasebook for our uplands and flatlands, waterlands and coastland, mountains, woods, hunting life, swords and axes, Bastard Countryside and Stone-Books. A companion to code 95656 The Old Ways. 434pp, page decorations and some illus. Penguin paperback.