Robert Macfarlane is a British writer, PhD at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
He’s also much smarter than you and I.
Macfarlane’s first book, Mountains of the Mind, was published in 2003 and won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. …
The Wild Places was published in September 2007. …
The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot, the third in the ‘loose trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart’ …, was published in June 2012 …
Landmarks, a book that celebrates and defends the language of landscape, was published in the UK in March 2015. …
I started Old Ways … Found it brilliant, eloquent, academic intimidating, dense. Too much for me, in fact. I didn’t finish.
It’s as much poetry as prose.
Some day I’ll download all Macfarlane’s books to Kindle. Read them in the tent on a long, long, long hike.
I’m expecting an honorary PhD in the outdoors for that study. 🙂
besthike.com 
A nice reminder of Mountains of the Mind I read when first published. I was still climbing in the Alps and Himalaya at that time and it opened my eyes to a different perspective we have in the West of big mountains. I should have known better with a Nepalese wife and Sherpa friends who revered the mountains and never spoke of “conquering” them.