The castle is surrounded by tall waterfalls, and large gardens. Located near the White Queen's castle, the house of Tarrant Hightopp rests atop a cliff surrounded by waterfalls and green mountains. The entire house is modeled to resemble a top hat. Salazen Grum is the castle and former home of Queen Iracebeth , who lived there with her court, servants , and army. The castle seems to be entirely built from stone, with red as a predominant color.
It had gardens with many red roses and hedges cut into the shape of the Red Queen herself. After the Red Queen's reign ended, she was banished to the Outlands, and the castle fell to ruin. On the Frabjous Day, this large chess board served as the battle ground for the final clash between the armies of the White and Red Queens'. It was also here where Alice Kingsleigh slayed the Jabberwocky.
The region was populated mostly by humans, though some talking animals lived here as well. It was the original home of the Mad hatter himself, Tarrant Hightopp , his family, and their hat shop. The entire town and surrounding forest was burned to the ground by the Jabberwocky during the Horunvendush Day the day the Red Queen took control of Underland , and is currently abandoned.
This castle was located in the Witzend Town and the home of King Oleron and Queen Elsemere and the childhood home of the princesses Iracebeth and Mirana. This place was once surrounded by lush trees and beautiful flowers, but is now a gloomy wasteland. This is where Tarrant Hightopp , Thackery Earwicket , Mallymkun , and Chessur enjoy each others company by drinking tea and eating cakes. Alice Kingsleigh visited this place when she first came to Underland when she was a child, and again when she was a young adult.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when discussing such ethereal particles, Macfarlane asks if this search requires something like an act of faith — a question he asked his physicist guide Chris Toth at the Boulby lab. Here, Macfarlane meditates on the scars left on subterranean spaces during times of war, and the trauma inflicted on people in underground spaces.
In this region, with its long and painful history of sectarian violence, the local word for sinkhole, foiba , is now synonymous with the killings that took place at these sites during and after the Second World War. In the final third of the book, classical mythology gives way to other folk traditions. Indeed, it is his reading of Kalevala , the 19th-century collection of Finnish epic poetry, that brings us to the second physics-heavy landscape, at the other end of the world.
We have also now ensured that our legacy will live on, long after our cities and cultures have disappeared, but that this legacy will be mausoleums of radioactive waste — designed to remain impenetrable for tens of thousands of years. Macfarlane roots every space with humanity — vivid portraits of friends and acquaintances, sketches of historical or imagined figures from the vast stretches of human history.
Underland —which in August won the Wainwright Book Prize for nature writing — is also psychedelic with characters, and this is as much a story of the people whom Macfarlane shares his adventures with, as it is of the places they take him. Underland has shared a place in time with a summer of climate action protests. Macfarlane does include a call to action for all those reading the book. Close search menu Submit search Type to search. Topics Astronomy and space Atomic and molecular Biophysics and bioengineering Condensed matter Culture, history and society Environment and energy Instrumentation and measurement Materials Mathematics and computation Medical physics Optics and photonics Particle and nuclear Quantum.
Macfarlane cautions against the defeatist cowardice of taking the scale of deep time for permission to squander our precious allotment:. We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite — deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy.
For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.
Long ago, as Johannes Kepler — the first true astrophysicist — was revolutionizing our understanding of the universe, he envisioned the Earth as an ensouled body that has digestion, that suffers illness, that inhales and exhales like a living organism. He was ridiculed for it. Three centuries later, Rachel Carson made ecology a household word. Picking up where Kepler and Carson left off, Macfarlane adds:. When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert.
New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again.
Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth. To probe the mysteries of this largely unfathomed underland, Macfarlane explores mines and railway tunnels, catacombs and particle colliders, seeks answers from a spectrum of scientists and indigenous cultures, contemplates the relationship between landscape and language, and draws on the work of pioneers like forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, who uncovered the astonishing science of how trees communicate , and evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, who championed the interconnectedness of life across time, space, and species.
All taxonomies crumble, but fungi leave many of our fundamental categories in ruin. Fungi thwart our usual senses of what is whole and singular, of what defines an organism, and of what descent or inheritance means. They do strange things to time, because it is not easy to say where a fungus ends or begins, when it is born or when it dies.
To fungi, our world of light and air is their underland, into which they tentatively ascend here and there, now and then. With an eye to the wisdom of the more-than-human world , to which native cultures have been attuned for millennia and modern science is only just beginning to awaken, Macfarlane considers how fungi challenge us to reconceive some of our basic human constructs:.
As our historical narratives of progress have come to be questioned, so the notion of history itself has become remodelled. History no longer feels figurable as a forwards-flighting arrow or a self-intersecting spiral; better, perhaps, seen as a network branching and conjoining in many directions.
Nature, too, seems increasingly better understood in fungal terms: not as a single gleaming snow-peak or tumbling river in which we might find redemption, nor as a diorama that we deplore or adore from a distance — but rather as an assemblage of entanglements of which we are messily part.
We are coming to understand our bodies as habitats for hundreds of species of which Homo sapiens is only one, our guts as jungles of bacterial flora, our skins as blooming fantastically with fungi.
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