I relatively recently discovered a sub-genre of nature writing that focuses on place or landscape writing. I find that focusing on landscape strongly appeals to my own topographic inclinations and reflects the way I think about the world. Of these landscape writers, I haven’t come across any better than Robert Macfarlane. I’ve been working my way through his various writings and this quote from The Old Ways, a book about how paths interact with a landscape and ourselves, particularly resonated with me.

I havee long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscapes, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.’

As I envisage it, landscape projects us not like a jetty or peninsula, finite bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating. We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places – but we are far less good at saying what places make of us. For some time now it seems has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know myself.”

– Robert Macfarlane