The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (47 page)

––––,
The Heart of England
(London: J. M. Dent, 1906)

*–––– (ed.),
The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air
(London: E. Grant Richards, 1907)

––––,
Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work
(London: Hutchinson & Co., 1909)

*––––,
The South Country
(London: J. M. Dent, 1909)

––––,
George Borrow: The Man and His Books
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1912)

*––––,
The Icknield Way
(1913; London: Constable, 1916)

*––––,
In Pursuit of Spring
(London: Thomas Nelson, 1914)

––––,
Collected Poems
(London: Selwyn and Blount, 1920)

––––,
The Last Sheaf
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

*––––,
The Childhood of Edward Thomas: A Fragment of Autobiography and the War Diary
(1938; London: Faber and Faber, 1983)

––––,
Letters of Edward Thomas to Jesse Berridge
, ed. Anthony Berridge (London: Enitharmon, 1983)

*––––,
Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley
, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)

*––––,
Selected Letters of Edward Thomas
, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

*––––,
The Annotated Collected Poems
, ed. Edna Longley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2008)

––––,
Prose Writings: A Selected Edition
, ed. Lucy Newlyn and Guy Cuthbertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–), vols. 1 and 2

*Thomas, Helen,
Under Storm’s Wing
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1988)

Thomas, Myfanwy,
One of These Fine Days: Memoirs
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1982)

––––, 1932 foreword to
The South Country
(Stanbridge, Dorset: Little Toller, 2009)

Thomas, R. George,
Edward Thomas: A Portrait
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)

Thoreau, Henry David,
The Essays of Henry David Thoreau
, ed. Lewis Hyde (New York: North Point Press, 2002)

Tilley, Christopher,
The Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments
(Oxford: Berg, 1994)

Twain, Mark,
Life on the Mississippi
(1883; London: Penguin, 1986)

Watkins,Alfred,
The Old Straight Track
(1925; London: Abacus, 1974)

Watts, Stephen,
Mountain Language/Lingua di Montagna
(London: Hearing Eye, 2009)

West, Rebecca,
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia
(1942; Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993)

White, Kenneth,
Across the Territories
(Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004)

––––,
On the Atlantic Edge
(Dingwall: Sandstone, 2006)

Whitman, Walt,
Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose
(New York: Library of America, 1982)

Williamson, Henry,
Tarka the Otter
(1927; London: Book Club Associates, 1985)

Wordsworth, William,
The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth
, ed. Paul D. Sheats (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1952)

––––,
Prose Works of William Wordsworth
, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)

––––,
Guide to the Lakes
(1810; London: Frances Lincoln, 2004)

Wright, Patrick,
On Living in an Old Country
(London: Verso, 1985)

Zwicky, Jan,
Wisdom and Metaphor
(Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2008)

Glossary

albedo
The proportion of light reflected from a surface.

Anthropocene
A recently coined and as yet informal term from geologic chronology that refers to the period of earth history in which human activities have had a significant global impact (
see also
Holocene
).

anticline
A line or axis, geologically speaking, from which strata slope or dip down in opposite directions.

archipelago
A group of islands; or a sheet of water or sea in which is scattered a group of islands.

barrow
A mound of earth or stones erected over a grave. Neolithic barrows tend to be ‘long’ and lozenge-shaped; Bronze Age barrows tend to be ‘round’.

bealach
(Gaelic) A pass; a gap or col between two hills.

bleb
A bubble of air in water, glass, ice or other substance that is, or was, fluid.

boll
A rounded
boss
or knob; a rounded seed-vessel or pod, as in flax or cotton.

boreal
Of or pertaining to the north.

boss
A protruberance or swelling; a hump or hunch.

brae
(Old English) A slope or hillside.

breck
A breach, blemish or failing; thus ‘Brecklands’, the name given to the ‘broken’ sandy heathlands of south Norfolk.

burn
A stream, brook or small river.

carr
A bog or fen grown up with low bushes (willows, alders).

chert
A form of amorphous silica occurring in several varieties, of which one is flint.

chorten
A Buddhist place or object of worship.

coccolith
Individual plates of calcium carbonate formed by certain single-celled algae.

cognitive dissonance
The experience of holding conflicting ideas or experiences simultaneously.

combe
Generally, a hollow or valley. In the chalk-lands of southern England, a hollow or valley on the flank of a hill, or a steep short valley running up from the sea coast. In Cumbria and Scotland, a crescent-shaped scoop or valley in the side of a hill.

corbel
Architecturally, a projection of stone jutting out from the face of a wall to support a superincumbent weight. Also, a raven.

Cretaceous
Chalk or chalky; also the geological period of generally warm climate and high sea levels extending from
c
.145 million years ago to
c
.65 million years ago. It is associated with a flowering of biodiversity, a massive extinction pulse at its end, and the laying down of huge chalk deposits.

croft
An agricultural smallholding.

currach
A small boat of wickerwork covered with hides, used in ancient times in Scotland and Ireland. Generally ‘currach’, or ‘curragh’, in Ireland and Scotland, and ‘coracle’ in England.

cursus
In terms of
Neolithic
monuments: long parallel banks with outside ditches and squared or curved ends, which run across country, often for long distances. The most famous example in England is the Dorset cursus.

cut for sign
In tracking and hunting, to range back and forth across an area of ground looking for evidence of passage.

darshan
(Sanskrit) ‘Seeing’ in the sense of ‘beholding a divine vision’.

deckled
In book production, having a rough uncut edge.

declivity
A downslope (as opposed to an acclivity, an upslope).

dendritic
Of branching form, arborescent, tree-like.

dry valley
A valley found in chalk or limestone landscape that no longer has a surface flow of water; thought often to have been created after the last Ice Age when melted water eroded the chalk down to the permafrost layer.

dupel
Metallic chaff dropped by aeroplanes during the Second World War to confuse radar detection.

eoliths
The name given to the earliest worked stones.

erratic
In geology, a stray mass of rock, foreign to the surrounding strata, that has been transported from its original site, apparently by glacial action. More generally and adjectivally: wandering, nomadic.

exultation
The collective noun for skylarks; almost as good as ‘a deceit of lapwings’.

feldspar
The name given to a group of minerals, usually white or flesh-red in colour, occurring in crystalline masses (granite, for example, is often composed of feldspar, quartz and mica);
see also
gneiss
.

floe
A sheet of floating ice; a portion of an ice field.

fluting
Used to describe the runnel-like ice structures that can form on steep mountain faces under certain weather conditions.

foil
The tracks or body impressions of deer and other animals on grass or leaf-covered surfaces.

gansey
A dialect version of ‘Guernsey’, i.e. close-knitted woollen material.

gean
Another word for the wild cherry,
Prunus avium
.

gelid
Cold as ice.

ghillie
(Scots) The person who acts as guide and attendant on shooting or fishing expeditions on an estate.

gill
A stream or small river; also a deep cleft or ravine, usually wooded and rocky, following the course of a stream.

gneiss
A metamorphic rock composed, like granite, of quartz,
feldspar
or orthoclase, and mica, but distinguished from granite by its foliated or laminated structure.

gnomon
The pin or pillar at the centre of a sundial, the fall of whose shadow indicates the time of day.

guga
(Gaelic) A young gannet.

gyre
To whirl, turn in revolutions, circles or spirals. In its noun form, a whirl, circle or spiral.

haar
A wet mist or sea fog.

hanger
A wood on the side of a steep hill.

headland
The unploughed area at the top of a field, left where the horse, ox or tractor turns.

heel-trail
A trail which is followed in the opposite way to which it is made, i.e. against the flow.

helical
Having the form of a helix: screw-shaped, spiralling.

hierophany
A manifestation of the sacred.

hodology
The study of roads and pathways (the word is absent from the
OED
, but usages can be found in Frank Morley’s
The Great North Road
, with a speculative reference, on his part, back to D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, thence to Goethe, thence to Aristotle).

holloway
A lane or path that has been grooved down into the surrounding landscape due to the erosive power of, variously, feet, wheels and rainwater.

Holocene
The geological epoch extending from the end of the Pleistocene (now globally dated to 11,700 years
BP
) to the present day; or – for supporters of the
Anthropocene
– to the start of the Anthropocene.

hoodoo
A tall thin spire of rock.

immram
A wonder-voyage, a sea journey to an otherworld.

infaunal
Dwelling within sediment or the substrate of a sea floor.

isobar
A line connecting places on the earth’s surface at which the barometric pressure is the same.

isthmus
A narrow portion of land, enclosed on each side by water and connecting two larger bodies of land; a neck of land.

itinerary
A line or course of travel; a book or map describing a line or course of travel.