Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a “spell book” that will conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. The news of these substitutions - the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual - became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The list of these “lost words” included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary - widely used in schools around the world - was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped.

He is married to Professor Julia Lovell and they have three children.From bestselling Landmarks author Robert Macfarlane and acclaimed artist and author Jackie Morris, a beautiful collection of poems and illustrations to help readers rediscover the magic of the natural world. Robert is Director of Studies in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. It's been adapted for performance and widely distributed in schools and care homes. It highlighted how words such as bluebell, conker, heron and kingfisher were disappearing from modern British childhoods. His book The Lost Words, created with the artist Jackie Morris and published in 2017, became a phenomenon. In The Old Ways, he headed out on foot, following often ancient pathways through a range of landscapes, both in Britain and beyond. In The Wild Places, he travelled to marshes and moors, cliff-tops and beaches, in search of remaining areas of wilderness in the British Isles. His interest in the wider natural world also developed from a young age, and much of his writing focuses on the environments around us and how we relate to them.

This childhood experience led to a lifelong passion, and inspired his first book, Mountains of the Mind, about the complex human fascination with mountains.

He was born into a family of enthusiastic amateur climbers and his early memories include being carried up the Cairngorms on his father's back. Robert Macfarlane is a writer whose books about the natural world, including The Wild Places and The Old Ways, have won many prizes and taken root in the best-seller charts.

Robert macfarlane the lost words