434 pages
English language
Published Aug. 24, 2016
"Landmarks is a book about the power of language - 'strong style, single words' - to shape our sense of place. It is both a field guide to the literature the author loves (Nan Shepherd, Roger Deakin and many more), and a 'word-hoard', gathering an astonishing archive of place-terms from old Norse to Anglo-Romani, living Norman to Hebridean Gaelic. Over the book's course, via its chapters, its glossaries and surprise of its postscript - we come to realize that words, well used, are not just a means to describe landscape, but also a way to know it, and to love it"--from publisher.
I found the first half of the book to be an incredibly interesting read and will be reading books by Nan Sheperd, Roger Deakin and The Peregrine following on from it. However, I found the second half to be fairly dull. Also, as a Welsh speaker I was interested in what would appear in the glossaries and was disappointed to find relatively few terms.
