interview by XERXES COOK portrait by BELLA HOWARD Robert Macfarlane is the 38-year-old author of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind, a loose trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart. They are books that were “walked into being” in a pact between writing and walking that is almost as old as literature itself — “as a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells,” as he puts it in The Old Ways. Here, Purple Travel meets the British writer under the shade of a sprawling Oriental plane tree in Cambridge. XERXES COOK — In The Old Ways, you wrote that there are two things to ask of a landscape: “What do I know in this place that I know nowhere else?” and “What does this place know of me that I cannot know…