Holloway

Robert Macfarlane is the author of <i>Mountains of the Mind</i> <i>The Wild Places </i>and <i>The Old Ways</i> and was the Chair of judges for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Stanley Donwood is an artist. He has produced record covers for Radiohead and has exhibited worldwide. He is also the author of a collection of stories <i>Humour</i>. Dan Richards is a writer. His first book was <i>The Beechwood Airship Interviews</i> and his second concerning his great-great-aunt the pioneering mountaineer Dorothy Pilley is <i>Climbing Days.</i> Holloway - a hollow way a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall hoof-hit wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock. In July 2005 Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin - author of <i>Wildwood -</i> travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows spectres & great strangeness. Six years later after Roger Deakin's early death Robert Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The book is about those journeys and that landscape. <br><br> Moving in the spaces between social history psychogeography and travel writing <i>Holloway </i>is a beautiful and haunted work of art. <b><i>Holloway</i> by Robert Macfarlane and Dan Richards is a eerily beautiful piece of nature writing with Stanley Donwood's spectacular etchings of woodland scenes.</b> Anyone who has grown increasingly impressed by Macfarlane's nature writing over the past decade will feel instantly at home in this slight collaboration with writer Dan Richards and illustrator Stanley Donwood ... With Donwood's ghostly Hansel and Gretel-esque illustrations peppering the prose Holloway is undeniably a gorgeous package. Even though it takes less than half an hour to read the subtle call to revel in the wonder of the natural world lasts much longer. An impressionistic piece of landscape writing Holloway evokes the sense that time is densely layered in these secret lanes; many people have trodden here and their ghosts are still apparent in the deep tree-shaded paths. A perfect miniature prose poem of a book beautifully printed and published. The pleasures herein are almost intangible and they're certainly initially fleeting. Yet these pellucid tales of Dorset's deep-set lanes and their duvets of foliage will stay with you long into the summer dusk and may even encourage you to embark on your own investigation of England's ancient arteries. Glorious ... endearingly open-hearted. This beautifully produced book is part tribute to the late Roger Deakin part trafelogue and bearing in mind the Faber imprint part poetic evocation of the 'Holloways' of south Dorset infused with Macfarlane's sensitivity to nature and beautifully illustrated by Stanley Donwood.