Radio Times: Review by:; Jane Anderson

Journeying by foot along the Icknield Way is now an occasion to meet walkers not workers, observes the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane, but it was not always so. This path, from Norfolk to Dorset, like all the old ways of Great Britain, has felt the footfall of drovers, shepherds, tinkers, troops and men desperate to find work in the next settlement along.

Macfarlane’s account of his lengthy, blister-bound trip is a piece of modern-day enlightenment. Following in the footsteps of the poet and nature writer Edward Thomas, whose 1916 book The Icknield Way was his inspiration, Robert makes mental and physical connections with those who trod this path before. There are intricately detailed portraits of the flora and fauna around him: the skylark alarm clock that both thrills and irritates as it wakens him at 4am and the iron fist of mud that trips him up at the start and cracks a rib.

Macfarlane has something of the poet about his writing style, too, and phrases like “a labyrinth of liberty” applied to the number of chalk tracks that criss-cross out from the Icknield Way make this an aural as much as an imaginative joy.

About this programme

1/5. By Robert Macfarlane. Abridged by Penny Leicester. The travel writer explores ancient pathways in Britain and overseas, making use of pilgrim paths, causeways and green roads as he walks along ancient routes in England, Scotland and Spain. He begins in Bedfordshire, where he discovers the price for setting foot on the region's chalk paths. Read by Dan Stevens.