For me and other residents of the North Shore of Greater Vancouver, the wilderness is literally blocks away. A line drawn due north from the peaks of the North Shore mountains to the Yukon border will intersect only four roads other than logging roads over a total linear distance of approximately 1,200 kilometres. Thus a world of difference separates our physical situation from that of Robert Macfarlane, one of the “sixty-three million people [who] live in the 120,000 square miles of land” that is modern Britain, where “remoteness has been almost abolished” and where “only a small and diminishing proportion of terrain is now more than five miles from a motorable surface.” In The Wild Places (Granta Books) Macfarlane offers what may well be a premonition of our own future as he goes in search of those few remaining vestiges of British wilderness. His journeys to these isolated locales (chapter titles include “Island,” “Moor,” “Salt­marsh” and “Tor”) are neither tourism nor travelogue, but a form of spiritual quest, which makes Macfarlane a kinsman to the early Celtic Christian monks and to those members of the bardic schools who first taught “the history of places through their names, so that the landscape became a theatre of memory, continually reminding its inhabitants of attachment and belonging.”