Nicholas Lezard's choiceTravel writingReviewIn the final book in his trilogy about landscape and the human heart, Macfarlane turns his attention to sacred encounters and wild walks

Finding a bad word to be said about Robert Macfarlane is no easy task. The inside front cover of the paperback lists 15 authors who made The Old Ways one of their books of the year last year; the next four pages contain quotations from 35 reviews, all saying, essentially, "Read this book." There comes a point when exhortation to do something proves counterproductive; and, further on from that point, it becomes perverse not to do it.

So I join, eventually, the end of a long line of Macfarlane fans. He is part of what we are being told these days is a new generation of travel writers who create personalised accounts of some form of extreme, or at least interesting, geographical tour. Of course anywhere is interesting if you bring enough attention to it, and this kind of thing has been going on since Marco Polo's stories were written up in the 13th century.

Macfarlane tends to prefer the wilder and woollier environments. His second book, The Wild Places, tried to get as close to wilderness as these islands can provide; I have not read his first, Mountains of the Mind, because of a review that said he describes whittling his frozen fingers with a penknife while crawling up, or down, some godforsaken peak.

We are spared that kind of scene here, I am pleased to report, and I must also add that "godforsaken" is pretty much the last word Macfarlane would use to describe a mountain. In his chapter on walking in the Himalayas, he quotes a companion on the concept of darshan, a Sanskrit word that "suggests a face-to-face encounter with the sacred on earth; with a physical manifestation of the holy", and we are reminded that the Sherpas who accompanied the first expeditions had no word to describe the summit of a mountain, as that was where the gods lived, so it would be blasphemous even to try to reach one.

But here, unlike in Mountains of the Mind, Macfarlane is more interested in passes and paths than in summits. He has managed, as far as I can see, to avoid repeating himself even as he revisits previous haunts. He describes this as "the third book in a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart", and that "loose" means it doesn't matter which order you read them in, or if you only read one. This is really a book about walking – though there is a good deal, too, about the paths of the sea. It is illuminating to be told that before the Romans came, there was an extraordinary amount of sea traffic around the British Isles and Europe, which helps account for the remarkable genetic similarity of people from various coastal regions extending from Orkney to Spain. He helps us understand what it is to see the water as as criss-crossed by routes as the land, partly by describing what it feels like to sleep in an open boat where the only navigational aid is the Pole Star.

There are also paths that are not paths: xenotopic places. He coins the word "xenotopia" to describe an uncanny landscape, and for my money the part of the book that nails this concept best, and which will get you irrevocably hooked on his writing, is when he travels the Broomway, a contingent path along tidal sands between Wakering Stairs and Foulness in Essex, unearthly in both the literal and figurative senses, and said to be the most dangerous path in Britain. (This is contested, for the same reasons, by champions of the Morecambe Bay path.) Perhaps writing about such a place is like taking photographs of Venice – that is, impossible to do badly – but I doubt it. Reading the chapter will leave you with an impression of strangeness you will rarely, if ever, have encountered elsewhere. This is first-rate writing, as you might expect from someone who regularly praises the great Nan Shepherd, whose The Living Mountain is an enduring marvel of nature-writing. Writing and walking are great companions – think of Iain Sinclair, or Will Self, whose two walking books, Psychogeography and Psycho Too, are sorely underrated. Here is a first-rate addition to the genre.

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