Dyffryn Mymbyr in Wales, a chilly hotbed of poetic literature (Image: Peter Marlow/Magnum)

VOCABULARY is an ever-changing terrain, reshaped by tongue and trends, just as the elements and town planners reconfigure the landscape of Britain. And the relationship between place and name, argues Robert Macfarlane, is deep-rooted and undervalued.

“Language is fossil poetry,” he writes, quoting 19th-century US essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Landmarks is a project Emerson would have recognised: a “word-hoard”. It attempts to preserve language and use it to pull us closer to our surroundings. This hoard is needed because specialised vocabularies are being burned off by apathy and urbanisation, says Macfarlane. In the mouths of the unimaginative, he reasons, generic language is shaping a “blandscape”.

“Specialised local vocabularies are being burned off by apathy and urbanisation”

Landmarks serves as a convivial field guide to the authors who have inspired Macfarlane’s magnificent writing: eco-philosophers such as John Muir, Roger Deakin and Nan Shepherd figure strongly. It has glossaries brimming with regional colloquialisms, from the poetically exact “ammil” – a term for the sparkle of morning sun through hoar frost – to the bawdy “wind-fucker”, a kestrel.

The tenth glossary is left playfully blank, hungrily awaiting future words, because Macfarlane is no doom-monger. Words, he says, “act as a compass to sing [the land] back into being”.

An ecologist, linguist and academic, Macfarlane is not above admitting his infatuation with Britain’s diverse landscape. “Nature does not name itself,” he writes. “Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on top of a mountain I just say, ‘Wow’.”

In The Fish Ladder, her first book, Katharine Norbury cannot afford to be so ingenuous. How truthfully she writes will determine whether her series of river walks from sea to source will be seen as a sufficiently heroic quest.

Her project is driven by her miscarriage and subsequent depression, making this a book as much about grief and motherhood as about landscape.

There are moments of quiet drama, such as her waking on moorland to find a stag standing over her. Still, her journeys are not epic. She acknowledges the semi-industrial nature of her surroundings. Those fish ladders, for instance, are structures that allow fish to bypass dams, leaping barriers on the way to their spawning grounds. They allow salmon and hydroelectricity to co-exist.

Less happily, there is something touristic about her fleeting visits, and their meaning is occasionally overthought, as in “the fact we’d brought sandwiches seemed significant, somehow indicative of a need for self-sufficiency”. She is only ever passing through.

The Fish Ladder is a valuable addition to the contemporary nature-memoir canon – although Norbury’s life of second homes and Latin family mottoes highlights the irony that so few of today’s memoirs about the natural world are written by those who work such harsh, remote lands.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Tied to the land”

British nature writing is undergoing a renaissance (Image: Steve Bloom Images/Alamy)

This pulse-quickening story of a woman’s obsession with training a female goshawk makes H is for Hawk a modern classic in a nature-writing renaissance

WHETHER it is a reaction to increased digitisation or to the expansion of urban and suburban sprawl, British nature writing is enjoying a golden era. But where previous custodians of the landscape were often tweedy scholars with the education, land and time to document species in dry tomes, today’s writers are a different breed.

Many books are now about the authors, their observational memoirs imbued with spiritual musings that attempt to make sense of the natural world, with animals providing succour during times of existential crisis. This is no bad thing – our emotional responses are as valuable as scientific pragmatism. The desire to protect, serve and understand previously persecuted creatures is one of humanity’s great attributes.

H is for Hawk is the apotheosis of the current nature renaissance. Author Helen Macdonald tells of her lifelong infatuation with the goshawk, a brilliant and beguiling creature, and how she rediscovered this passion as an adult after the death of her father.

With land enclosure laws limiting people’s ability to fly hawks, and the rise of firearms making shooting more popular than training them as hunting allies, by the late 19th century British goshawks went extinct. It was only in the 1960s that they were quietly and unofficially reintroduced.

Inspired by reading The Goshawk by T. H. White as a child, Macdonald contributed her own strand to the creature’s narrative by buying a hawk. She makes deep connections with it, wondering, for example, if her attachment to it is rooted in her loss of a twin sibling at birth.

Macdonald’s prose is poetic, forensic, yet often capable of quickening the pulse. Her lexicon of hawk life where austringers (keepers) fly tiercels (male hawks) on lengthy creances (leashes) is vivid and joyous, soaring as freely as birds do – “like a knife-cut, a smooth calligraphic scrawl”.

This article appeared in print under the headline “A bird in the hand”