Robert Macfarlane tells us that Landmarks, his fifth book, has been years in the making. All his life he has been drawn to writers who describe landscape and natural life with truthfulness and precision rather than in merely general terms. This unlocks its mystery and power, and enables us to behold nature with wonder. As a child, Macfarlane loved The Pebbles on the Beach by Clarence Ellis. This book “broke open” the language of stones and introduced him to a world of poetic names (carnelian, jet, agate … ), each with a fascinating geological story, described in obscure and beautiful new words (a xenolith, for instance: a stone that has been carried far from its origins by glacial action). He realised that the wondrous power of such words is located in their precision,