Dartmoor

by Melissa Harrison
Author of Rain: Four Walks in English Weather
“There are certain landscapes that get under your skin and for me that’s Dartmoor. It is romantic – and English in a very particular way – but it’s not untouched, so if you see it that way you’re missing what makes it captivating. This is an uplands landscape of moorlands and granite and it is marked and scarred; it has layers of use there for you to see: medieval tin mines, neolithic stone circles and the remains of Victorian tramways from when that granite was being extracted. And what’s happening to it now, how it is being managed by the Duchy of Cornwall, the MoD, and as a national park, that’s another layer of use that will become part of its history.

It’s part of my history in that it’s somewhere my family and I went every summer when I was a child. We used to visit my grandmother, who lived in Ashburton, and would rent a stone cottage in Buckland-in-the-Moor a few miles away. It was a happy time. There was, though, a long period when I didn’t go: my time at university and in my 20s. I found that you end up connecting places with your childhood and, in a way, feel like you’re exiled from them. It’s the land of childhood and you can’t go back. But, after the end of a difficult relationship, I did go back.

I went for a break and stayed in a B&B in Widecombe-in-the-Moor with an elderly couple who seemed concerned about me and would drive me in their Citroën 2CV to the start of my walks. It was astonishing to return to Dartmoor, to find that I didn’t dream it and that the places I remembered were still there. I think because of that absence and reconnection my relationship with the area has deepened.

The south west can be wet: there are two sea coasts and between them a big hump of upland, so you get orographic rainfall on Dartmoor. I’ve written about that weather in a chapter of Rain, and I’ve also mentioned how, as kids, my dad used to take my brothers and sisters out for hikes in that sometimes dreadful weather. We’d be wearing cheap cagoules and complaining, but I’m glad we did it because it taught me resilience. It taught me that you can go out, get wet and be uncomfortable but that is fine. You don’t have to seek convenience. In fact, if you do your life is limited by it.”
• To order a copy or Rain for £10.65 visit theguardianbookshop.com
Read Katharine Norbury’s review

The Outrun, Orkney

by Amy Liptrot
Author of The Outrun

“The weather is constantly changing in Orkney and you can watch it approaching over the sea. There is so much sea and so much sky and there are few trees – it feels like the landscape has been reduced to its raw elements.

The Outrun is the largest field on my dad’s sheep farm on the west coast of the Orkney mainland, where I grew up. Outrun is an agricultural term … you have “in-bye” land, which is the closest land to the farm steading, then there is “out-bye” land, or outrun, which is further away and uncultivated. Historically, it was often hill ground or communal grazing shared between crofts.

My Outrun is land edged by cliffs on the west side that look out on the Atlantic, all the way to Canada. To the south, on a clear day, you can see the mountains of Ben Hope and Ben Loyal on mainland Scotland. At the top [of the Outrun] is a seastack where birds nest and you can spot guillemots and puffins. You may also find primula scotica (Scottish primrose) growing, a tiny rare flower that survives in specific coastal conditions.

The area isn’t inaccessible, there’s a coastal path and you can walk from Skara Brae, the famous neolithic settlement, up to the Kitchener Memorial at Marwick Head. The memorial commemorates the loss of the HMS Hampshire, which sank off this coast in 1916 and claimed the lives of more than 600 servicemen, including Lord Kitchener.

I wouldn’t say it is the “best” place in the country but it does have particular meaning for me.

To some eyes it might look a bleak, unpromising place but it’s somewhere I love – and in all kinds of weather. I was there in January and went for a walk when it was hailing, but I felt exhilarated with the high seas and the crashing waves. I love it in summer, too, when you can spot great yellow bumblebees and look out to sea and try to pick out Sule Skerry – once the UK’s most remote manned lighthouse – about 30 miles to the west. I usually don’t see it, but I know it’s there.”
• To order a copy of The Outurn for £12.29 visit theguardianbookshop
Read Will Self’s review

Pulborough Brooks, West Sussex

by Alexandra Harris
Author of Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies

“Slip down between the grocer’s store and the pet shop in Pulborough, West Sussex. Barn House Lane narrows to a steep-sided track, there’s a gate at the end, then you’re out onto the Brooks, with the river Arun running between banks on the left and a great expanse of marsh stretching away to where the bare downs rise in the distance. There’s nowhere else like it; I’ve looked. This was the landscape I loved when I was growing up, and it’s still my secret standard for understanding other places.

It looks wild, but the flood plain is a working landscape shaped by human hands over centuries. The water level is precisely controlled by a network of drainage ditches which make grazing possible in summer, before the floods rise in winter and transform the humming grassland into an inland sea reflecting white skies. Even on warm days, when dragonflies flit in the meadowsweet, this place holds the memory of winter like a basin.

Part of the marsh is owned by the RSPB, and people come with their binoculars. I don’t see what they see: lapwings pass me by. But there’s already more than I can take in with two eyes: the shape of the land as I move through it, the texture of the grasses which change day by day. Each clump of rough sedge has a character of its own that seems to demand attention.

You can feel exposed and alone on the flat marsh, but there’s something sheltering and containing about this landscape too. Life has gone on, continuously, and left its traces on all sides. To the east is the site of a Roman bath; to the west there’s the Roman road, Stane Street (London Bridge to Chichester), which strikes confidently out across the wetland, undeterred by rising rivers.

The hamlet of Hardham is little more than a lay-by, but what a lay-by it is. There are 12th-century paintings in the church: a cycle of bible scenes drawn with the muscular contours of the Romanesque. Adam and Eve have been losing paradise here for 900 years, as the traffic goes by outside and a cow coughs in the water meadows on the other side of the road.

I don’t live in the area now, but perhaps the shape a place takes in the mind matters as much as what is verifiably there on the ground. At a distance, separate experiences fuse and colour each other. So the ochre of a painting in Hardham church becomes part of the tawny glow of a reed bank on the Brooks.”
• To order a copy of Weatherland for £20.46 visit theguardianbookshop
Read AS Byatt’s review

Wester Ross, Scottish Highlands

by Anna Pavord
Author of Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places

“My response to nature in no way includes wanting to conquer it. I love just to observe, to feel invisible, and one of the most amazing places to experience that is Wester Ross, in the north-west Highlands. When I first went there I was immediately hooked. Joy. Wonder. Respect. All of that. I remember thinking this is absolutely the place I want to be. That was 14 years ago and I’ve been back every year since.

It has a savagery that I like very much. I can wander up a track and there will be strange things to see, dramas playing out. I remember watching a buzzard through my field glasses as it swooped down – you rarely see them dive – and came up with a long grass snake. The snake was whipping and bending and curling. It was an amazing battle. The buzzard was trying to keep its equilibrium with this heavy thing in its beak. The snake suddenly whip-lashed itself free and fell back to the ground. I watched the buzzard circling before it decided not to return for another attempt.

Applecross peninsula is an amazing part of Wester Ross. From there, you can look west towards the horizon through five alternating planes of darkness and light: you have islands, water and mountain peaks. If you are there towards the end of the day and looking towards the sun, all colour is drained out of that landscape and the sea becomes a shimmering sheet of silver, ending in the jagged peaks of the Cuillins on Skye.

When I drive up in March, one of my favourite times, I have the excitement of seeing snow glistening on peaks and delight in the way shadows move over them. I enjoy the solitude around the cottage I rent to do my writing. October brings wonderful changes of colour: the rowan trees are full of berries, the birches become butter yellow and the bracken turns a fox-like colour. My only company then is the stags who bellow and fight – a magnificent sound to hear in the night.

Our landscape and its wildlife are staggering; we need to understand them better and to grasp there are few things we do that some plant, animal or insect can’t do better. One of the things I hoped when I was writing the book was that it might make people care more – because until you care about something you can’t fight for it.”
• To order a copy of Landskipping for £16 visit theguardianbookshop
Read Alexandra Harris’s review

High Dam, Cumbria

by Katharine Norbury
Author of The Fish Ladder

“My book The Fish Ladder is about a manmade structure and the place I’ve chosen, High Dam, in Cumbria, is also manmade. I enjoy the contrast: you are in the Lakes, with all the hills and tarns, and here is something we have created. But High Dam is also the first place in nature that as a child I grew to love.

My dad had helped his graduate supervisor at Liverpool University build a cottage near Newby Bridge and, as a result, we were able to stay there as a family every year. It was more of a bothy than a cottage: two rooms, no electricity, and water from a hosepipe off the side of the hill. We would walk behind the cottage to a wood, called Bell Intake, which led to a pool, Low Dam, and then we would come to High Dam.

High Dam is shallow – not like the ice-scooped tarns on the tops of the mountains – and in summer one end is filled with water lilies. It has this lovely tea colour because of the peat, is surrounded by pines, silver birch and oak and, to me, has always had a Swallows and Amazons feel. The dam was created in 1835 to feed the water wheel at Stott Park Bobbin Mill on the shores of Windermere, and you can still visit it; it’s run by English Heritage.

As a child it was an adventure to get to. There were footpaths, but they weren’t well-maintained then, and you’d be up to your thighs in mud if you slipped off the logs there for you to walk across. The Lake District national park runs a car park near there now; it’s a beauty spot! The paths have been made good and bridges have been put over streams. I was horrified when that happened but then I was a child and I didn’t want to share it.

Every time I visit there is this feeling of a new experience: the light on the water is different, the sound of the trees is different; go on a winter’s day and it’s covered in frost or snow; go on a glorious summer’s day and people are swimming in the tarn. I’ve visited so often all those imprints are in my memory. There are also memories of the people I’ve known. The test of love of someone was always to see how they responded to High Dam.”
• To order a copy of The Fish Ladder for £13.93 visit theguardianbookshop
Read Richard Kerridge’s review