Examine a large-scale map of the Essex coastline between the river Crouch and the river Thames, and you'll see a footpath which departs the land at a place called Wakering Stairs and heads east, straight into – or so it appears – the North Sea. A few hundred yards on, it veers north, heading out across Maplin Sands until, three miles later, it turns back in the direction whence it came, finally making landfall at Fisherman's Head, on the edge of Foulness Island.
Can this carefully traced line be for real? Certainly. You are not hallucinating. This is the Broomway, a path that is said to date from Roman times, and when Robert Macfarlane agrees to go walking with me, it's his first idea. Am I excited about this? Yes, and no. I'm thrilled at the idea of heading out with Macfarlane; I feel like a marathon runner who's been invited to train with Paula Radcliffe. But then I read his book, The Old Ways, and anxiety rolls in, like Essex mist. The Broomway, which can only be crossed when the tide is out, is the deadliest path in Britain; Edwardian newspapers, relishing its rapacious reputation – 66 of its dead lie in Foulness churchyard – rechristened it "the Doomway". As he notes, even the Ordnance Survey map registers the "gothic" atmosphere of the path: "WARNING," it reads. "Public rights of way across Maplin Sands can be dangerous. Seek local advice." I admire Macfarlane hugely; I would love to watch him "walking on silver water" in the "mirror-world" that is the Broomway. On the other hand, I would probably prefer not to drown in the service of trying to tell you what a good writer he is.
In the end, I'm saved by our diaries, which match neither the tide tables, nor the schedule of a nearby military firing range. Instead, we meet at Ivinghoe Beacon in the Chilterns – a much less intimidating point that conveniently connects two of the other "old ways" in his book: the Icknield Way, which rises somewhere in south Norfolk, and the Ridgeway, which continues on through Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. Both paths compete for the title of "oldest road in Britain", and both provide, for those who walk them, what Macfarlane calls "communion with the prehistoric". They are spectral places, ghostly with the leathery feet of the ancient past – though admittedly such eeriness may seem elusive when first you pull up at a crowded National Trust car park on a fine Sunday morning. If all is Gore-Tex, it's hard to get in touch with woad.
Macfarlane, I can't help but notice, is currently the male literary critic's favourite action man; they adore his sentences, but they also, one senses, live vicariously through him. By rights, then, he should live up to their fantasies by looking a little different from all of them. He should be gnarled. He should have huge hands, and shoulders like boulders. In fact, he is aspen-slight, with a grave, elfin face, and a warm, earnest manner. He greets me in the aforementioned car park with a wave, and a grin, and then we get going. The walk he has chosen – it takes us a sauntering three hours – is clever: a boutique yomp that provides a perfect microcosm of the southern British landscape. First there are fields, preternaturally green, and then a good Chiltern wood, with beech trees and yellow birdsnest, bluebells, celandines and a few plucky primroses. After this, there is a canal, where we see a heron take flight, and both of us say, at almost the same moment, how much it resembles a pterodactyl. A scramble up a railway embankment takes us to a road, and then into another wood, only now we are suddenly high up – or at least, high up for this part of the world – with a view into a valley, where we can see a reservoir, duck egg blue and perilously low. Finally, we walk along the line of a chalk hill, where a strange and lonely bonsai elder – "elders are bushes that long to be trees," says Macfarlane – cowers in the soft wind.
Along the way, we see a kite or two, and a skylark, hovering as if on the end of an invisible stick, but also a village dog-obedience class, and an archery competition. After weeks of rain, the sun shines all day long. It's so enchanting, and so very English, we might have stumbled into Rupert's Nutwood, or one of the William Brown stories. Is Macfarlane a good companion? Yes. It's not just that he talks so resonantly about music and books and Call of Duty (one of his students at Cambridge, where he is a don, recently presented a seminar on the computer game, which sounds like the end of days to me, though he insists not); it's the quality of his looking that I like. How is it that he knows the name of everything? His book is so full of unfamiliar words – gneiss, dolerite, transhumance, stupa, tain, chert – that it concludes with a lengthy glossary. He shakes his head. "I really am very poor with plants," he says. "I know my birds, though I'm not a birder. I know my trees ... reasonably. It's a vernacular acquaintance born of spending a long time outside."
The thought occurs that Macfarlane doesn't stumble on enchantment; he creates it. It is as though – batty as this sounds – it follows him about, the landscape and even the weather rising to meet the challenge of his prose. His books, he says, could not be written without leaving his desk; they must be walked into existence (his first, Mountains of the Mind, was a meditation on altitude, and won him the Guardian First Book award; his second, The Wild Places, took in all that is left untamed on our islands; The Old Ways, a book about the consensual, habitual manner in which paths are formed and maintained down the ages, now completes this loose trilogy on the various ways we're shaped by landscape).
But you do wonder: which comes first? Does the walk incite the book, or does the book incite the walk? It's the former, he says, particularly in the case of this third volume.
"I originally thought I would make a long walk from the Wash down to Dorset, but in the end, the image of a single path was replaced with the image of a network, and that was when the book became really exciting. Paths are human; they are the traces of our relationships, in some ways. The book inevitably began to be about chance meetings, and so things would just ... happen. Someone put me in touch with Raja Shehadeh [the Palestinian lawyer and walker, who lives in Ramallah], and I wanted to write about trespass, and so I went to walk with him. There are lots of people in this book. It's a book about how walking is alive in so many people's lives, and is vital to the provision of metaphor as well as a sense of openness and encounter."
My own view is that The Old Ways might have been better – more unified, more powerful – without any foreign escapades; his adventures on these islands are plenty dramatic enough. You would pick it up for his account of walking the Broomway alone, which he does in bare feet, the better to feel the "brain-like corrugations" of the hard sand: "I took my shoes off, and placed them on a stand of eelgrass. For some reason, I couldn't overcome my sense of tides as volatile rather than fixed, capricious rather than regulated. What if the tides disobeyed the moon, on this day of all days?" But the book also takes him out to the lonely stack, Sula Sgeir, where the men of Ness, on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, each year harvest gannets, to be salted and preserved and eaten through the winter (paths, you see, may be watery as well as stony), and where Macfarlane experiences an extraordinary epiphany.
And later to the Chanctonbury Ring, on the South Downs, where something spooky happens in dead of night: human cries hovering above his little tent. "I still find that hard to explain, rationally," he says. "I'm not a mystic, and yet this idea of setting out on these paths which are so profoundly and durably associated with time folding back on itself ... what I think I heard was owls, possibly tawnys, but there was a weird geometry to the event, these two voices that moved, and then joined, and were so human. The only reason I didn't flee was that it was two o'clock in the morning."
He sleeps in secluded bothies, and beneath venerable hedgerows. He meets tramps, pilgrims and exiles. He traces the footsteps of the artist Eric Ravilious, the poet Edward Thomas, and Nan Shepherd, the Grampian novelist. It is, in many ways, an unwieldy rucksack of a book. But if you had to suggest what connects each place, each thought, to the other, you would say: joy. "Yes, I really wanted to write about joy," he says. It is, he thinks, frustrating that so many of the words one is compelled to use in connection with the countryside are religious: the blessing of sunshine falling through trees, the grace of cool water on blistered feet. "The term 'spiritual' is so culturally contraband. But I've searched and searched, and there are no better words. Religious language is all we've got." Walking, like faith, is a balm: Charles Darwin used to solve problems with a particular circuit (the trickier the problem, the more circuits required); Edward Thomas used it to ease his crushing depressions. "Though it has limits. It didn't always work for him [Thomas]. Walks can be frustrating and tiring, and there might be a point where thought is annihilated." But still, it's worth saying it: walk, and you will probably feel better.
Macfarlane grew up near Nottingham. His parents are doctors. They were a camping family, and he had grandparents who were still climbing on Ben Nevis – with ropes and helmets – well into their 70s; the outdoors is in his blood. "But when I was 16, I did this marathon walk – the Lakeland 3,000 – and I came down at the end of it absolutely broken. Mountains had become purgatory, so I left them alone for a while." He went back to them later, of course, but his three books inadvertently tell a private story: they move, he says, "from an upward urge to a peripatetic ground level".
He stopped climbing because he lost his nerve: "I experienced an uncontrollable proliferation of possible negative outcomes, which is to say… fear." Will he ever return to it? "I went back to the Alps last summer for the first time in 10 years, and managed to fall, unroped, into a crevasse, which was rather unsatisfactory. Stuck. My feet kicking in the space below me." He laughs. Does his wife – he is married to the sinologist Julia Lovell and they have two children – worry about him? "No. She just thinks all will be well, and probably it will be. My record of competence isn't great. As a student, I went climbing in Kyrgyzstan, and the Russian guides ran a book on whether we would leave without serious injury. But I don't do really dangerous things."
He read English at Cambridge, and looks back now with "astonishment" on the boy he was. "I had colour posters of Harrier jump jets on my walls. Basically, I was still 15." But he loved the work, and pretty soon he knew he wanted to be involved in books. He was made a fellow at Emmanuel College while he was still writing his PhD (it was about originality and plagiarism in Victorian literature). "I don't quite know how it happened, but I love teaching."
His writing life, which began early – the acclaimed Mountains of the Mind was published when he was still in his 20s – has, he says, been a huge surprise. "I wanted to be a poet, and I wrote shockingly bad poetry. I wanted to be a novelist, and I wrote shockingly bad short stories." Finding his subject was – cue a slow intake of breath – another blessing, though he writes exceptionally slowly. "Every sentence in my book will have had between 20 and 100 versions of itself."
We've been sitting on a bowered carpet of beech nuts all this while. But now it's time to make for the car. Macfarlane, having offered me a last square of Dairy Milk – hooray that it's not fair trade organic with 90% cocoa solids! – pulls on his sweater; the wind is up a little. Like one of the heroes of his book, Edward Thomas, he is, I've noticed, borderline obsessed with weather – as attentive to it as a lover. "Yes, but without being too pernickety about prepositions, I'm interested in thinking in the weather, not about it. Most of our prepositions suggest separateness from the weather world. But we are natural barometers. We are weathered."
In his book, he writes of a Gaelic expression that describes the fleeting shadows cast on moorland as clouds scud across the sky on a bright, windy day. What is it again? "I think it's rionnach maoim," he says, pleased that I've remembered it. "That precision. The beauty of exactitude. I'm working for that in my own writing."
And so we set off, reinvigorated by chocolate, and a language neither of us speaks.
