Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, Dan Richards – review Jul 19th 2013, 07:00
William Dalrymple on a gorgeously produced little book from a writer at the peak of his power
High on the North York Moors, winding through the wild sheep tracks between Peak Scar, Cold Kirkby and Gormire, there is a holloway, or sunken path, cut so deeply into the limestone that at first sight you might take it to be a work of Victorian engineering. Although it looks a little like a railway cutting, or some other prodigy of eccentric 19th-century rural improvement, this track predates the Victorians by hundreds, if not thousands of years. It is almost certainly of prehistoric origins, but its heyday was the high middle ages, when it linked two of the greatest Cistercian abbeys in the land: Rievaulx and Byland.
As a nerdy, archaeologically obsessed 16-year-old, I became fascinated with this old holloway running both over and under the moors. Partly this was because the country it passed through was some of the most beautiful I had ever seen: great sweeps of rolling moorland and pasture dropping from the crags of Sutton Bank and then slowly diminishing over hills and dales, as it ebbed down to the chequerboard of valley-bottom strip-fields, and hence to the banks of Rievaulx's former millrace, the Rye. But mostly I loved the track because it was so clearly and profoundly haunted.
Nowhere I had ever been seemed more medieval, or even, in the right weather, primeval. I used to imagine the hooded figures – choir monks and the lay brothers who ran the monastic granges and sheep shearing stations, with their brindling flocks and their creaking wagons – passing solemnly and silently up the track as the great bells of Rievaulx tolled below. These were bells that some of the more imaginative inhabitants claimed they could still hear booming over the Rye valley, even though they were melted down at the time of Henry VIII.
Down in the depths of the holloway, you could see neither metalled roads nor telegraph poles, nor even the most distant glimpses of the outsized golf balls of the early warning radar up on Fylingdales. Centuries blurred. I scrabbled away with my trowel, trying to unearth the bones of wild animals – I felt sure that elk and wolves and even mammoths had passed that way. Occasionally I came across a fragment of Whitby jet that I thought might be a Neolithic arrowhead.
I always thought I was alone in finding such roads so resonant of the past, until I came across the latest work from Robert Macfarlane. It is a perfect miniature prose-poem of a book, beautifully printed and published, and co-authored with his friend and travelling companion Dan Richards. Reading it, I had that pleasure of chiming recognition you get when you read something expressing feelings you believed only you had ever felt. For Macfarlane also finds that "down in the dusk" of a holloway, "the landscape's past felt excitingly alive and coexistent, as if history had pleated back on itself, bringing discontinuous moments into contact".
Holloway is illustrated with evocative woodcuts by Stanley Donwood, better known for his artwork on Radiohead albums, but who here provides etchings that show the influence of 1930s British artists such as David Jones, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Leon Underwood, Paul and John Nash and the two Erics, Gill and Ravilious. You can also, I think, detect the influence of the great Edward Bawden. These images, thoroughly contemporary but with such clear echoes to the aesthetic of another age, are the perfect accompaniment to Macfarlane's prose.
For just as Donwood seems to be channelling the 1930s ruralist English woodcutters, so Macfarlane is drawing on a deep wellspring of nature writing: his musical repetitions echo those of Gerald Manley Hopkins; the precision of his nature writing draws on JA Baker, author of The Peregrine as well as the higher travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron (the latter being the source of his fondness for lists); while his sensitivity to the spirit (and spirits) of the past recalls his hero Edward Thomas.
For Macfarlane is clear that holloways are possessed of the past in the way other places, and other roads, are not: "You do not have to be a mystic," he writes, "to accept that certain paths are linear only in a simple sense. Like trees, they have branches and like rivers they have tributaries. They are rifts within which time might exist as pure surface, prone to recapitulation and rhyme, weird morphologies, uncanny doublings." Walking along such paths, he says, "you might walk up strange pasts, in the hunter's sense of 'walking up' meaning 'to flush out, to disturb what is concealed'." In this he follows Thomas, who claimed to have heard "the voices of long-dead Roman soldiers as he walked an ancient trackway near Trawsfynydd in Wales. In Hampshire, where a stand of aspens whispered at the cross-roads of two old paths, he listened to the speech of a vanished village: the ringing of hammer, shoe, and anvil from the smithy, the clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing from the inn." Thomas's poems, Macfarlane writes, "are thronged with ghosts, doubles and paths that run through people as surely as they run through places".
The ostensible excuse for the journey into the holloway is to explore the south Dorset geography described so evocatively in the 1930s thriller, Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household. In this novel the hero flees into the deep holloway, remembering his way from childhood explorations, and uses it to elude mysterious pursuers. This starting point allows Macfarlane to link his holloway with a long history of fugitives who have taken the strange semi-subterranean tunnels of the holloway, "creating correspondences that survived as a territorial imperative to concealment, escape and encounter". He is especially interested in the network of Catholic recusants who were based at nearby Chideock and who used the old rural tracks to play "a high-stakes game of hide‑and‑seek, the priests fugitive in the landscape, hiding in the woods and holloways; soldiers hunting for them and their supplicants".
Macfarlane is one of our most physical writers, and the greatest pleasure of his prose is his ability to capture the spirit of a place. The precision of his writing gives it authority. He knows his botany, so when describing the hidden entrance to the holloway he is able to list the guardian plants with great exactness: between the snaking tree roots he spots "the umbrals: hart's tongue fern, shining cranesbill, ivy, and moschatel, the lover of shade". More importantly he knows the geology beneath his feet, and knows which stones – "malmstone, greensand, sandstone, chalk" – are soft enough to hold the impression of passing feet, for "like creases in the hand, or the wear on a stone sill of a doorstep or stair", holloways "are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing."
Macfarlane contributes only 25 pages of prose to this book; the final 15 are the work of Richards. To take up your pen and attempt to follow Macfarlane, writing now clearly at the peak of his power, in his own home territory of nature and descriptive writing, is an unenviable task, but Richards does not do a bad job at all, and his haiku-like paragraphs of more abstracted memoir form a beautiful piece of writing in their own right.
Holloway is physically a very slight object but it is an exceptionally written, gorgeously produced little gem. It will have to act as an amuse bouche to satisfy us until Macfarlane produces his next major project. This, rumour has it, takes him deeper into Albion, beneath even the holloways, as he walks down into the bowels of England's earth.
• William Dalrymple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan is published by Bloomsbury
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