It is an account of the development of Western attitudes to mountains and precipitous landscapes, and takes its title from a line by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
[9] The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot, the third in the "loose trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart" begun by Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places, was published in June 2012.
Macfarlane's detailed writing style, and his frequent references to dialect vocabulary, were satirised in a February 2016 edition of Private Eye by Craig Brown in the magazine's regular "Diary" feature.
All work for the book was given for free, and all moneys raised were donated to MOAS, the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, to save refugee lives.
[18] The "lost" words of the book's title are twenty of the names for everyday nature—from "Acorn" through to "Wren" by way of "Bluebell", "Kingfisher", "Lark" and "Otter"—that were controversially dropped from inclusion in the Oxford Junior Dictionary due to under-use by children.
[15] Grassroots campaigns sprang up to raise money to place copies of the book in every primary and special school in all of Scotland,[19] half of England and a quarter of Wales.
The book is used by charities and carers working with dementia sufferers, refugees, survivors of domestic abuse, childhood cancer patients, and people in terminal care.
[20] It was the inspiration for Spell Songs, a folk music concert and album by musicians including Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis and Kris Drever.
[23] In collaboration with the director Jen Peedom, the cinematographer Renan Ozturk and the composer Richard Tognetti, Macfarlane worked on the film Mountain,[24] which premiered with a live performance from the Australian Chamber Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House in June 2017.
[27] With the Oscar-nominated composer Hauschka and the director Rob Petit, Macfarlane made Upstream, a film set in the Cairngorm mountains in winter.
Macfarlane is a nature writer in the broadest sense, part of a tradition of writing about landscape, place, travel, and nature that includes John Muir, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, as well as contemporary figures such as John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez and his friend Roger Deakin.
He is associated with other walker-writers including Patrick Leigh Fermor, Nan Shepherd and Laurie Lee, and seen as one of a number of recent British writers who have provoked a new critical and popular interest in writing about landscape.
In 2018 Macfarlane co-edited, with Chris Packham and Patrick Barkham, A People's Manifesto For Wildlife, arguing for urgent and large-scale change in Britain's relationship with nature.
[33] In June 2012, Macfarlane wrote the libretto to a "jazz opera" called Untrue Island, composed by the double-bassist Arnie Somogyi, and performed in a former nuclear weapons storage site on Orford Ness in Suffolk.
[34] His work has been involved with the music of contemporary musicians including Johnny Flynn,[35][36] Frank Turner, The Memory Band, Grasscut, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart.
[37] He has designed with Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson a steel pool installation planned to be on the beach of Silecroft in Cumbria as part of a new art program for Lake District Coast.