Water flight

I had to renew Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways (2012) and I'm still just inching my way through it.  The writing is so tight and creates such word pictures and stories of the old pathways by land or by water that I will soon fork over the money to buy the book.  The hardback library copy is beginning to get beat up in my bag.  It seems like each word and phrase brings me new discoveries. 
Let me read you a piece...but first a little background.  Ian, a sailor, leads the author by boat to the North Atlantic rocky island of Sula Sgeir following the old water and flight pathway made by the gannet.

     Ian told me a story, an old one that I had encountered before.  Ver-
sions of it exist near the gannetries of the Irish and Scottish west
coasts, revised to freshness with each new telling.  A small open boat
is sailing out to St Kilda--or to Rona, or the Blaskets (choose your
distant island)--when, far out of sight of land, it passes through a
herring shoal so profuse that the surface of the sea seems firm enough
to walk on.  The herring brings the predators:  whales, dolphins and
gannets, gannets in their thousands, thumping down from the sky
in the sea all around the boat.
     'Suddenly,' said Ian, 'there comes a noise like a firearm being dis-
charged.  Pack!'
     A gannet has dived by error into the open boat itself and there it is,
up near the bow, stone dead, its body limp and its beak driven clean
through the timber of the hull, its great wings, six feet for sure from
tip to tip, splayed on the thwarts.  Twenty miles from land in the big
Atlantic waves and with a hole in the hull; well, that should have been
death to the boat and its people.  But then they realize that the gan-
net's impact has been so powerful that it has plugged the hole it made.

pages 130-1, The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane

This book is filled with great stories and beautiful language that ripples and deepens what we know of the old pathways.

Denis Streeter