Writer Robert Macfarlane, of Cambridge, Great Britain, recently published the third book in a "loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart". Through tracing the history first of man's relationship with mountains,  then with wilderness and lastly with pathways, Macfarlane finds some of the most insightful ways to uncover and explore man's own depth, height, nature and quests.

Indeed, the natural world around us is not simply an object of admiration or exploitation... Man has lived with, struggled  with, discovered, used, enjoyed and ignored the physical world, the history of which is so intimately woven into his own.

The author's uniquely skillful yet beautifully simple usage of English, at times humble and ordinary and often brilliantly poetic, allows him to paint true masterpieces where the deftness of expression is a quite wonderful demonstration of how words can communicate something of the deepest and most subtle of man's truest experiences. Reading these books is an essential reminder of how depth of thought is available to all, however cheap an environment we have come to live in.

Mountains of the mind, a history of fascination (Granta 2003)

The wild places (Granta 2007)

The old ways, a journey on foot (Hamish Hamilton 2012)