In 2007 Jon Krakauer’s book Into The Wild got the Hollywood treatment to quite some critical acclaim. For those who don’t know the story, American student Christopher McCandless, in a fit of frustration with modern materialist lifestyle, destroys his credit cards, gives away the majority of his life savings to Oxfam, takes his beloved Datsun and drives off in search of isolation in America’s wildest state, Alaska. There are twists and turns and in the end it’s pretty tragic but the point is this: there is still something that drives us towards the wild and the remote. What is it?

For Robert Macfarlane, it’s "not so much about finding ourselves as about forgetting ourselves". Macfarlane, a Fellow at Emmanuel, knows what it is to feel stuck in the bubble of everyday life and believes in the power of the wild as a release. "Cambridge teaches us to manicure our brains endlessly. It’s all about fine-tuning and finessing our sense of ourselves but actually that can be very fatiguing." Looking out over Parker’s Piece, he cites the American author Wallace Stegner, who he also refers to in his book The Wild Places, "Stegner talks about finding a sense of bigness outside yourself and a sense of distraction, modesty, humility."

Despite the tame surroundings, Macfarlane’s eyes gaze beyond the Cambridge skyline to the mountains. He has a deep-rooted passion for the wild stemming from his formative childhood years. With a grandfather who was a diplomat and an "accomplished and serious mountaineer", Macfarlane grew up to the tune of stories from the reaches of far-flung mountains. He tells how, in the thirties, a time when Fascist body worship and mountaineering’s desire to claim peaks naturally coincided, his grandfather climbed a mountain in Turkey only to discover a Nazi pennant claiming the summit. "He took it down to show the local villagers and to say that the Nazis were trying to take over their landscape. The pennant still exists, I saw it the other day." He also spent a lot of time with his parents in Scotland and the Lake District and unsurprisingly, his first book, Mountains of the Mind is "partly about this but also partly tries to explain why wild, particularly mountainous, landscapes have such a hold over us to the degree that people are willing to die for them – for love of a lump of rock and ice".

Ironically, this first book was written below sea level in the basement room Macfarlane lived in whilst studying for his PhD, only a few hundred metres round the corner from where we meet. Soon after this he got married and his dreams of Himalayan exploration metamorphosed into the safer option of discovering the wild closer to home, hence The Wild Places. He describes the book as "a coming to terms with England, with the local and the lateral and the coastal rather than the distant, the vertical and the mountainous." For someone who has been reared on mountainous landscapes it can’t be easy to exist in a setting that is almost the polar opposite but Macfarlane is realistic, "I have learnt to love this region more and more but it takes patience and a different kind of looking".

The arable landscape of the Fens has in recent years spawned a small explosion of literature about the wild: Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker, Macfarlane himself. It seems paradoxical but it might actually make sense. In this most cultivated of England’s landscapes we just have to look that little bit harder to find the untouched bits. It was the Essex landscape that provided the scenery for the desolate prose of J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, a book Macfarlane describes as "incredible". Baker’s account of tracking a pair of peregrine falcons from autumn to spring, takes the human desire for the wild to different plane, a point at which the author’s sense of self is lost, merging into the consciousness of a hawk. Finding this ‘sense of bigness’ is not limited to the grandiose vistas of the Scottish moors or the rugged slopes of Northern England but it is even in something as small as a bird.

Artists over past centuries have found myriad ways of responding to landscape. Even the Neolithic bluestones of Stonehenge are part of this tradition. Skipping forward into more recent years, the Land Art movement has risen to prominence thanks to the work of Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash et al. But, isn’t the taking of elements from natural landscapes and reorganizing them almost counter-intuitive, even counterproductive? "Or counter feral?" Macfarlane laughs.They may make us look at landscape differently but "it’s complicated," as he admits. "In Richard Long’s work, walking becomes a sculptural act and his foot becomes the stylus with which he writes a mark on the land. You can see mark making as antagonistic to the wild and in some senses there’s nothing better than getting a train to the coast, sit[ting] on a Norfolk beach and discover[ing] that you’re in one of the great migration flyways of Northern Europe".

So in a world Google Earth seems to have vacuumed of mystery, how can we really find the wild? "To walk" is Macfarlane’s instant response, "above all it is to walk. At the very least, people could walk to Granchester along the river path and I’m sure most people do do that at some point. That tow-path is in itself a story. Woolf has walked it, Rupert Brooke has walked it and swum it, Sylvia Plath hurled a clay head of herself somewhere into the river mud. People talk about breaking the Cambridge bubble and usually that means going home or going to London but it could just mean catching a train up to Whittlesea and walking along the dykes and lode paths there."

Escaping "oppressive" Cambridge for Macfarlane, as he describes in the first chapter of his book, often means climbing his favourite ‘observatory’ tree. Ever since revealing this though there have been a spate of people trying to find it. I try my hand at prizing out the information. "It’s just near Wandlebury, in a Beech plantation, but no, I won’t reveal exactly which one!" And that after all is the key. When we come over all Christopher McCandless and need to step outside the daily drudge, it’s all about finding our own space and our very own ‘sense of bigness’.

 

On your bike... 4 paths to explore 

Whittlesey

For £8.70 student return fare and a 50 minute train journey, you can escape to Whittlesey, an ancient Fenland town six miles east of Peterborough. With the River Nene meandering by and a pub for every week of the year, there’s no better place to escape college library repetitive strain injury.

Wandlebury Ring

One of the largest Iron Age hill forts in England. Dug in 5th Century BC, it forms part of Wandlebury Country Park. To get there, grab the Stagecoach Citiplus X13 and X13a service between Cambridge & Haverhill.

Gog Magog Downs

Although a university decree of 1574 forbade students to visit the ‘Gogs’ on pain of a fine, times have thankfully changed.Wandlebury is, in fact, part of the Gog Magog Downs. The myth runs that the Downs are the bodies of hyperborean giants who lay down exhaustedly south of Cambridge where eventually chalk formed over them.

Granchester

Many students wander along the towpath to Grantchester, famous for its pubs and Brooke’s favoured haunt, The Orchard Tea Garden . Beyond the village keep going and you’ll find more isolation, peace and maybe even a little wildness. Just keep walking (or cycling)...