There is a word, smeuse, that names the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal. It is a Sussex dialect term. Robert Macfarlane records it in Landmarks, and once it is read, the thing it names becomes visible. The eye, given the word, begins to find the gap.
This is the argument, and it is worth separating from the pleasure of the prose. Macfarlane is widely read as a writer of walks and high places, a maker of sentences about chalk and tor and the underland beneath our feet. He is that. But the claim running beneath The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland is harder and less comfortable than the travel writing it arrives wrapped in. It is a claim about perception, and about what happens to it when the words go.
A glossary against forgetting
Landmarks is built around glossaries. Between its chapters, Macfarlane sets long lists of terms gathered from across Britain and Ireland, regional, dialectal, and Gaelic words for specific weathers, waters, and ground. Each is a small instrument of attention. Ammil, a Devon word, names the thin film of ice that lacquers leaves and grass when a freeze follows a thaw, so that the whole landscape glitters. Rionnach maoim is a Gaelic term for the shadows cast on moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright, windy day. Caochan, again from the Gaelic, is a slender moor-stream so overhung by vegetation that it is hidden from sight.
These are not decorative. They are precise. Each names a phenomenon that the standard vocabulary would have to circle around in a clause, or miss entirely. And it is the precision that matters to the argument. A word like rionnach maoim is not a synonym for shadow. It carries within it a whole set of conditions, the moor, the wind, the broken cloud, the particular quality of a day when the light is constantly moving. To know the word is to be equipped to notice the day.
Macfarlane’s contention, which he traces in part to thinkers before him, is that this runs in both directions. We name what we perceive. But we also perceive, increasingly, what we have been given the names for. Strip the names away and the phenomena do not vanish, the ammil still forms, the caochan still runs hidden under the heather, but our capacity to register them, to hold them as distinct things worthy of attention, thins. The world does not get smaller. Our reading of it does.
The substitution he refused
The occasion for Landmarks was a particular loss. Macfarlane noted that a recent edition of a children’s dictionary had removed a number of words for the natural world, acorn, bluebell, kingfisher, otter, among others, to make room for words drawn from the world of screens and networks. The substitution was made on the grounds of relevance. Children, the reasoning went, no longer encountered these things often enough for the words to earn their place.
What he saw in this was not a neutral updating but a closing of a door. If the word for the kingfisher is gone before the child ever meets the bird, the meeting, when it comes, has no place to land. The flash of blue over the water arrives as an event without a name, and an event without a name is hard to keep. This is the engine of the whole book: language not as an ornament laid over experience but as the structure that makes certain experiences available at all.
It would be easy to read this as a lament, and easier still to read it as a kind of rural sentiment, the old words for the old ways, mourned by a man who likes to walk. Macfarlane is careful to resist that reading, and the resistance is what gives the work its weight. He is not arguing that the past was better. He is arguing that vocabulary is a faculty, and that faculties, unused, atrophy. The loss he describes is not of a quaint inheritance but of an instrument of perception still entirely capable of work.
Why this belongs anywhere attention is paid
The terms he gathers are mostly tied to landscapes, coastal, upland, moor, fen. But the principle is portable, and it is the reason the work rewards anyone whose attention is given to specific material things rather than general ones.
To anyone who works with a real material, the argument is immediately recognisable. The difference between a vocabulary that names firmness and one that names trace, the faint drag a finish leaves as it sets, is the difference between knowing a thing has happened and being able to watch it happen. The specific word is not a flourish. It is a way of seeing. A coast in the west supplies its own such vocabulary, much of it unwritten: words for the particular grey of the water before weather, for the wrack-line, for the kind of light that comes off wet basalt. To name them is the first condition of attending to them.
Macfarlane’s recovery work is not a campaign to make people speak in dialect. It is something quieter and more serious: an insistence that the precision of a word and the precision of a perception are the same precision, and that we lose them together or keep them together. The glossaries in Landmarks are not a museum. They are a set of working tools, set down where they can be picked up again.
The ammil still forms. Someone has to have the word ready.