Penguin, 2016, 443 p, including 2 p Contents, 7 p Guide to the Glossaries, 23 p Notes, 5 p Select Bibliography, 6 p Acknowledgements and 10 p Index.

Landmarks is a meditation on landscape, wildlife and language. Each section of the book focuses on a particular type of landscape – flatlands, uplands, waterlands, coastlands, underlands, northlands, edgelands (those peripheral to urban areas) earthlands, woodlands, with a last one on children’s perceptions – and is appended by a glossary of words relating to it which MacFarlane has come across or finds apposite. A postscript discusses the reactions he has had to the book’s first printing and adds further words which he was sent in the meantime by readers of the first edition. Most sections deal with the writings of a single individual associated with that landscape – Nan Shepherd with mountains, Roger Deakin with water, J A Baker with birds, Richard Skelton with land, Barry Lopez with polar territories, Richard Jefferies with the edgelands (the Bastard Countryside,) Clarence Ellis on stones and rocks, John Muir on woodlands – and MacFarlane’s encounters with them or their works.

He laments the loss of connection modern children have with nature, in particular exemplified by the removal of many wildlife and landscape words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in favour of those to do with electronic devices and other indoor pursuits. This will be exacerbated by the reduction in wildlife, the many birds and insect species is serious decline. Most of the avid observers of the natural world whom he reveres have taken particular care to see, to notice. The second section, A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook, relates how the proposers and supporters of the setting up of a windfarm on the isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides saw nothing on the land but scrub heather. However the locals and sympathetic ecologists who took the time to see and observe noted how diverse but still unique the ecology there is, and united to oppose the plans successfully.

Among the nuggets sprinkling the text is John Muir’s account of surfing an avalanche. (Basically by spreading his limbs and hoping for the best.)

It is in the words describing our surroundings that MacFarlane glories and the glossaries of words used in different counties and from the different languages of the British Isles, English Scots, Irish, Welsh, Gaelic, Anglo-Romani and one heretofore unknown to me Jèrriais (also known as Jersey Norman, there are also Norman variants in Guernsey and Sark.)

Take wonty-tump, a Herefordshire word for molehill, or zwer, the onomatopœic whizzing noise made by partridges breaking from cover, mi-chàilear, a Gaelic word for even more dreich than dreich,* airymouse, a Cornwall word for a bat and, a favourite of mine, apricity, the warmth of the sun on a cold winter’s day. There are also delightful dialect words (such as smeuse,) for the holes in hedges through which an animal can pass, different words for the holes used by different animals.

MacFarlane’s attention to language is clear. In an aside he says “E M Forster once compared the use of exclamation marks to laughing at one’s own jokes, but for (John) Muir the exclamation mark was a means of notating rapture.”

This is a wonderful book for anyone interested in language, words or the natural world.

I did have some quibbles, though. Skite is defined as “to splash, usually with muddy water” and is noted as a N Ireland usage. In Scotland this word means to glance off a surface (‘the ball skited off the pitch.’) Several other words assigned to N Ireland are widespread in Scots: hirple (to walk awkwardly or with a limp,) slater (woodlouse,) gowk (cuckoo, or foolish person, ‘Ya daft gowk!’) glar (thick sticky mud) and its adjective, glarry, also surely derive from the Scots noun glaur, whins (gorse bushes) is most definitely Scots. I suspect all these originated in Scotland and were transplanted to the province along with James VI’s settlers.

Chucky – a small flat stone – is described as a word from Galloway. In my youth – not spent in Galloway – we frequently talked of chucky stones, so-called, I always assumed, because they could easily be chucked (i.e. thrown.) Clairt, for mud, is given as Scots; more commonly it’s used as an adjective, clarty, as of mud-spattered clothes or skin, and by extension is used to mean dirty.

MacFarlane does point out in his guide to the glossaries that he did not include variant spellings nor cross-reference between languages and dialects.

The Notes are not signalled on the relevant page but instead all lumped together in an appendix, and are therefore divorced from their context.

*For those who don’t know it, dreich is Scots for dull, overcast, misty (usually all at the same time) and generally depressing weather. In Scots ‘even more dreich than dreich’ is often rendered as ‘gey dreich’.

Pedant’s corner:- “aeroplanes that crash into the plateau, killing their crew” (aeroplanes plural; therefore crews,) protestor (usually ‘protester’,) Jefferies’ (Jefferies’s. [I note that MacFarlane had Thomas’s not Thomas’],) pentstemon (penstemon.)

Quercus, 2011, 324 p, including i p Reading and ii p Acknowledgements.

This non-fiction book is Grieg’s tribute to Norman MacCaig, one of that generation of Scottish poets which included Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh McDiarmid,) Sidney Goodsir Smith, Sorley MacLean and Edwin Morgan, to whom Greig as an aspiring poet himself looked up. Not long before MacCaig’s death he laid on Greig a request that he catch for him a fish at the loch of the green corrie (which isn’t the loch’s real name) in MacCaig’s beloved Assynt in the western Highlands. But it is much more than a mere tribute. It is an appreciation of MacCaig’s poetry, a voyage into Greig’s past and present relationhips, and into the Deep Time which geologist James Hutton divined must be the case from his studies of the native rocks of that area and the changes which had been wrought on them, a threnody to the landscape of Assynt (and Scotland as whole,) a paean to friendship, a meditation on the usefulness – or otherwise – of literature, a celebration of what it means to be human. Anyone familiar with Greig’s fiction will recognise the affinities with it that this book displays, the same sympathetic observation of people and customs, the same sense of a writer exposing the human soul.

That disposition makes itself felt from time to time, “Most team games have their roots in warfare or fertility rituals – shinty dispenses with the fertility part,” a consideration of Deep Time with the present moment leads to a comparison with bifocal lenses, “the close-up and the long distance are true, while the middle distance is fuzzy and befuddled. Unfortunately that is where we live most of the time,” a reference to “the curious indifference of our English friends and partners to being English” indicates the vagaries of nationality. The culture of the western Highlands is illuminated via the thought that drinking is sacramental as long as it’s done in company, “what possible pleasure could there be in drinking alone?” Grieg touches on the importance of scale and size in making the Scottish landscape so alluring. The hills of Wales and the Lake and Peak districts of England are somewhat tame in comparison, “domestic,” while the Himalayas are too austere and grand. (As well as fishing, composing poetry and writing fiction Greig has mountaineering as one of his pastimes. How does he find the time to write?)

But it is literature that is a continual spur – and disappointment, a poetical apprehension of failure. “The word is an arrow that will always miss its mark. ‘The curse of literacy’.”

Pedant’s corner:- “A phantom pantheon of poets come trooping up these winding stairs” (a phantom pantheon comes,) “the short, direct terms that Low Dutch imported into English to such forceful effect” (surely Low Dutch exported these and English imported them?) missing commas before pieces of direct speech, “two core principals” (principles makes more sense,) sprung (sprang,) “born off downstream” (borne off,) “ropey weed” (weed like rope, used, I suppose, to distinguish from ‘ropy’ weed, weed that’s not good at being weed,) “Johnson‘s Baby Powder” (Johnson’s.)