Christopher Somerville

Jun 7, 2024 | thetimes.com | Christopher Somerville

The Nottinghamshire countryside east of Retford lies low and rolling, a mosaic of isolated farmhouses and fields connected by an extensive network of old green lanes. Wide and rutted between ancient hedgerows full of wildlife, these grassy lanes are rare survivors, reminders of what all back-country roads were like before the advent of tarmac and the motor car. We set off from the Boat Inn by the Chesterfield Canal in Hayton under a pale blue sky, hazy with heat.

May 31, 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | Christopher Somerville

This walk starts along one of the most beautiful waterside paths in the Yorkshire Dales, a cornucopia of waterfalls, clear pools, wildflowers and birds of the uplands. Buttery yellow bird’s-foot trefoil, salad burnet, golden tormentil and rock rose; blue of milkwort and butterwort on lime-green leaf rosettes, early purple orchid still in bloom. The banks of the beck were spattered with the bright colours of low-growing plants, well sheltered in the narrow valley.

May 24, 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | Christopher Somerville

A sunlit late spring day in Leicestershire, the lush grass shin high in the pastures, enough dandelion clocks in the uncut meadows to teach the time to every child in Peatling Parva. Young cattle blew and sighed as they followed us timidly among floods of buttercups. There were kingcups in the little trickling slip of a brook, and campion as pink as nail polish in the field margins.

May 10, 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | Christopher Somerville

The neighbouring counties of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire butt up against one another near Mickleton, and today’s walk would be shared between the latter two. The houses of Mickleton stood in beautiful Cotswold stone, more cream than gold in colour. In the high wall of the manor house a line of musketry loopholes bore witness to the invasion fears of 1940. In the buttercup pastures beyond St Lawrence’s Church, newly shorn ewes bleated for their small lambs.

May 3, 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | Christopher Somerville

At a cattle grid just outside Barningham we were scratching our heads over which way to go when the farmer pulled up on his quad bike. While his border collie watched us with deep suspicion from the passenger seat, he not only pointed out the way over Barningham Moor, but gave us chapter and verse on local lore — ancient mounds in the fields, solstice alignments, old trackways, drove roads.