Holloway

London: Faber & Faber. Paperback, 2014.

"Holloway" is a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock. In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin - author of Wildwood - traveled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres & great strangeness. Six years later, after Roger Deakin's early death, Robert Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The book is about those journeys and that landscape.

Holloway is a beautiful and haunted work of art.

"Anyone who has grown increasingly impressed by Macfarlane's nature writing over the past decade will feel instantly at home in this slight collaboration with writer Dan Richards and illustrator Stanley Donwood ... With Donwood's ghostly, Hansel and Gretel-esque illustrations peppering the prose, Holloway is undeniably a gorgeous package. Even though it takes less than half an hour to read, the subtle call to revel in the wonder of the natural world lasts much longer."
- Ben East, Observer

"An impressionistic piece of landscape writing, Holloway evokes the sense that time is densely layered in these secret lanes; many people have trodden here, and their ghosts are still apparent in the deep tree-shaded paths."
- Carl Wilkinson, Financial Times