Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks, Essex, J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

At first I resisted Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks. I was too involved already on my own terms in land and language and didn't want to be distracted, though I wished him well and was glad people were reading this and indeed lauding him for doing a good job of introducing not just a set of ideas but also a set of writers for further reading.

However I did read it in the end. I had come to the end of Robert Musil (a heavy book for nighttime reading) and Landmarks was there, a thick but light paperback, a present from a friend. In one of the introductory chapters, A Counter-Desecration Phrase-book,  I read an account of a battle against wind turbines in the Hebrides which so resonated with our efforts against a proposed neighbouring solar development last year that if I read no more this would win my thanks. I envied the group effort of locals in the Hebrides who explored the invisible content of the land by walking and scrutinising and reviving the words particular to the place. And they won. I envied that too.

I was interested in J.A. Baker who was walking the Essex marshes at approximately the same time as I was, except he was following peregrines and then I couldn't tell a peregrine from a handsaw. Though we were both shortsighted and came from unhappy families. As Robert Macfarlane says, J.A. Baker's book The Peregrine is less about following a peregrine than about becoming one (I read about someone trying to become a badger a while back) which, if you have a crippled body and poor sight, involves a yearning and fury and a despair that only an obsession can start to satisfy.