Robert MacFarlane began the book that became Landmarks when he learned of certain words dropped from a recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Among those excised were acorn, kingfisher, and pasture to make way for newly-essential terms such as bullet-point, celebrity, and voicemail. The move may very well be advisable for navigating the world we have made for ourselves and reflect (in the editors' words) “the consensus experience of modern-day childhood." Nevertheless Macfarlane convincingly argues the cull reflects the loss of something deeper, something shared between the people of a place in their language.

Landmarks is partly a lament for our lack of understanding of the natural world—and more precisely the very specific ways of talking about and living in very specific places. To name something is often to be able to see it: to learn that "smeuse" is a term in Sussex for the "gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal" means being able to notice something new on your walk through the countryside. Nine glossaries mark the chapters of the book, each filled with dialectical variants of terms for the natural and geologigical features of precisely experienced places from a writer equally captivated by language and landscape. They are a delight in themselves, but the narrative journey between these ideas, and through terms at once new and familiar, is irresistible.