It is in the end a deeply stirring book, in being able to find the vivid wild in places that are so trammelled with our sterile banks of knowledge about them. In using the body to step beyond the ironic into an immediacy of a tangible, audible, testable world. In reversing what Macfarlane calls "the retreat from the real". Wildness becomes not some fragmentary thing surviving in scraps and fragments which have to be fenced around with a busy protectiveness. It is much much more than that.

Macfarlane also feels on the outside of things. This is partly because wildness in early 21st-century Britain is a hard thing to find - pushed to the margins (or so he begins by thinking), where it has not been entirely vanquished by pollution and modern farming and population growth. Then there are the difficulties created by the shortcomings of language to express what he feels, and the problems of containing a proper emotional response to a landscape within a more analytic appreciation of its qualities. "I could not explain what it really looked like," he says early in the book, when visiting an island cave, "certainly not what I was doing there, among the red and purple basalts." Later, the same note returns: "Open spaces bring to the mind something which is difficult to express"; "we find it hard to make language grip landscapes that are close-toned".