“fast bowler George Hirst and left-arm spinner Wilfred Rhodes…”

“steel tycoon Lakshmi Mital, planetary industrialist Mukesh Ambani… beverage giant Vijay Mallya.”

“Irishman William Butler Yeats was still in his forties…”
“… a fine residential circus completed by local builder John Snell in the middle…”

The last two are from Matthew Hollis’s otherwise beautiful biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France. If a poet such as Hollis can’t entirely shake off tabloid influence, maybe there’s no point in fighting it (and I’ve been banging on about this for a while), but I’m going to carry on. Maybe we need a campaign, with a snappy slogan. Articles of Faith? Or maybe ROAR, for Restore Our Articles Right now.

Two thirds of the way through his book, Macfarlane quotes one of the best-known lines of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

“Caminante, no hay camino;
se hace camino al andar…”

Wanderer, there is no path;
Paths are made by walking.

Books, too. This one was paced out in the South Downs, the Scottish Highlands and the Spanish Sierras; in the disputed terrain of Palestine and on the pilgrim’s route to the sacred Himalayan mountain of Minya Konka. It’s a meditation on the ways in which paths can open your mind while stretching your legs; on footfall as a way of seeing.

Macfarlane’s guiding spirit is the poet Edward Thomas, a man who “not only thought on paths and of them but with them”. He mapped his own interior landscape by beating the bounds of Sarn Helen in Wales and the Ridgeway in southern England.

The book’s subtitle, “A journey on foot”, doesn’t quite do justice to Macfarlane’s range, for he takes to the water as well, following the sea lanes in the Outer Hebrides with a sailor poet. Other characters with whom he crosses paths include an artist who keeps a skeleton not in his closet but in his workshop, and a custodian of a magical record of walks, a “Library of the Forest”, who might have stepped from the pages of that bestselling novel of Barcelona The Shadow of the Wind.

The Old Ways is the third book of a loose trilogy Macfarlane began with Mountains of the Mind and continued with The Wild Places. Once a climber himself, intent on summits and unexplored territory, he says he is now “happier on the beaten track, following the footsteps of others”.

But he hasn’t gone soft. He writes regularly in this new book of walking shoeless, sleeping out under the stars and breaking ice on pools before going for a swim. If he is led by others on the ground, he sets his own pace on the page. He’s a wonderful phrase-maker: he watches the “celestial bling” of meteor showers, listens in to “the game-show buzzers of jays and crows”; sees London clay as “the pink of a hedge fund manager’s shirt”.

As in his earlier books, there’s a scholarly rigour beneath the poetry, but a readiness, too, to embrace what can’t be explained, whether it’s a “panther” glimpsed on an English country road or the screams of an “invisible presence” at night on the South Downs.

The Old Ways is a book as rich in diversions as all the best paths, and it makes your feet itch to be off.

Here’s an earlier CNN video, with commentary in English, about the train:

A much less familiar contribution to American travel literature has just made its first appearance on this side of the pond: The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, by F Scott Fitzgerald (Hesperus Press). It’s a fictionalised account of an eight-day trip made by Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from Connecticut to Alabama. They set out with dreams of the biscuits and peaches of the South, and end up limping from garage to garage in a banger he calls the Expenso.

Julian Evans (biographer of Norman Lewis), who has been badgering publishers here for years to bring out the piece — written originally as a series for a motoring magazine –  contributes a critical introduction, and there’s a foreword from Paul Theroux. Together, their contributions run to 19 pages, and Fitzgerald’s text itself is only about 56 pages. If that seems a little unbalanced (and so does Fitzgerald in his casual racism), this is still a jolly Wodehousian jaunt, and revealing both of Fitzgerald and of the way he turned his life into fiction.

There’s a tradition there of holding contests in which songbirds are encouraged to compete against one another in sweetness and volume. According to a report in La Vanguardia, the handlers, not content with the performance of their birds, have begun to dope them with something called unte, the principal ingredient of which is testosterone. If X-Factor ratings continue falling, surely it’s only a matter of time before Simon Cowell gets the same idea.

Coasting by Jonathan Raban (Picador) How far do you have to go to write a travel book? Just around home if you’re Jonathan Raban, who sees Thatcherite Britain — and himself — with the detachment of a foreigner from the deck of his 30ft ketch. It’s a book inspired by Tristram Shandy, with digressions into everything from memoir to lit crit. I press it into the hands of all would-be travel writers.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee (Penguin) Spain as seen in 1934 by a young poet who was hungry for experience, and often just hungry. He sailed to Vigo with a knapsack, a fiddle and enough Spanish to order a glass of water. “I didn’t bother to wonder what would happen then, for already I saw myself there, brown as an apostle, walking the white dust roads through the orange groves.”

Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis (Picador) is the great man’s account of a village on the Costa Brava before the arrival of concrete; a place where the fishermen reported their successes and failures in blank verse and a stuffed dugong known as “the mermaid” decorated the bar. It has all the qualities that made Lewis one of our finest travel writers: the unfailing eye for oddity, the lyrical prose, the gentle humour.

Venice by Jan Morris (Faber) Guidebooks need updating; love letters don’t. Morris published this one in 1960. Though Venice has changed and so has the writer — she no longer loves the city in the way she did — a first-time visitor in possession of a copy is guaranteed to be smitten.

The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck (Penguin). Of men and microscopes, you might say. Steinbeck takes a 4,000-mile geography field trip with his biologist friend Ed Ricketts (the model for Doc in the novel Cannery Row) into the Gulf of California, where they enjoy “a real tempest in our small teapot minds”.

River Town by Peter Hessler (John Murray) What would it be like to spend two years as an American peace corps volunteer teaching English in a small city in China? And what would the Chinese make of such a volunteer? Hessler’s achievement is to answer both those questions, in a tender, empathetic book about his two years in Fuling, on the Yangtze.

India File by Trevor Fishlock (John Murray) Before he was the Telegraph’s man in Moscow, in the momentous days of Gorbachev, Trevor Fishlock was the Times’s man in Delhi. This book was first published then, in 1983, and could hardly be said to be up to the minute, but its 200 pages still make for a great primer in what can initially be an overwhelming country. “Thanks for recommending India File,” I’ve often been told. “It made a great trip even better.”

Watermen by Randall S Peffer (Johns Hopkins University Press) Key “Watermen” and “Maryland” into a search engine, and this will pop up near the top of the results. I came across it years ago the old-fashioned way — browsing in local bookshops. It’s a vivid and salty account of a year Peffer spent with the fishermen of the Chesapeake Bay on their graceful sailing boats, the skipjacks.

Frontiers of Heaven by Stanley Stewart (Flamingo) “No one has ever spoken well of Urumqui, and I am unable to break with this miserable tradition,” says Stanley Stewart of the capital of Xinjiang. But he writes extremely well — of Urumqi as well as all the other stops on this journey through China beyond the Great Wall, for which he won the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book of the Year Award in 1996.

Chasing the Monsoon by Alexander Frater (Picador) Most of us travel to get away from rain; Frater goes looking for it, all the way round India, finding romance in mud, slush and puddles, and joining in the rejoicing and sense of renewal that accompany the downpour.

For more on Pasricha’s work, see www.panoramas.in.

If you like blues and soul, you’ll love the Alabama Shakes. Their debut EP is due out shortly. For the moment, you can stream a few of their songs on their website.