I am proud to know these familiar little spots, for they have helped me learn to appreciate where I live and feel more attached to it, despite Thoreau’s insistence that a landscape can ‘never become quite familiar to you’, no matter how long you live there. 

But can a single map really be enough exploration for a lifetime? Pootling around one map for a year rarely felt like an adventure, I’ll admit. But it did often feel like exploring. I enjoyed many tingles of surprise on my map of small wonders. I won’t push your credulity in claiming it was epic, but something about the experience resonated with the sliver of my soul that wants always to look beyond the hori- zon. My weekly meanderings did a decent job of keeping a lid on that restlessness. So much so, in fact, that I feel something akin to vertigo at contemplating the prospect of having the entire globe to explore. 

If you pick up a map of your local area, choose a grid square at ran- dom, and begin walking around it with your eyes open, you’ll soon be mesmerised by the possibilities for local exploration. After that, it is up to you. What will you look for? What will you care about and want to take a stand on? 

My map has changed my perception of home, made me less tempt- ed to fly, and more motivated to care for the environment. There is so much potential for a future full of positive stories, if only we demand change and take action. 

This local map could fuel my curiosity for ever, in a way I once thought only distant places could do. My map is a fractal of the world. Today is a fractal of my life. To know one place well and to make it better is the work of a lifetime. And so, yes, a single map can be enough. 

I had spent an entire year on a small map that I’d feared would be boring and meagre. But I saw now that I was nowhere near to know- ing it fully. I would need to continue at the same pace for another seven years before I even visited every square, let alone travelled around each one in each season, during rush hour or at dawn, by bike or on foot, alone or with a companion. You never pass through the same grid square twice. I can never know even one map, not in all its sea- sons and weather, nor all its harvests and wildlife. And I had barely begun on the countless human stories and history intertwined in my nondescript neighbourhood. 

The Duke of Wellington was one of Britain’s greatest military heroes, as well as a Prime Minister. Although he was born way back in 1769, he lived long enough to have his photograph taken, which is impressive considering he was involved in sixty battles. And he is also a legend in the very diverse worlds of rubber boots and beef cooked in pastry. 

Reading about fieldfares led me down a Twitter rabbit hole via the #vismig hashtag, of which I’d never heard. Visible migration (which I’d never heard of either) is the ‘visible’ migration of birds and butterflies during daylight. Many other species migrate at night (#nocmig), which 

is harder to monitor unless flocks reach the coast at dawn, an event known as ‘falls’. We learnt a lot about nocturnal migrations when radar was invented in the First World War. All those birds could now be observed for the first time, showing up on radar screens as ‘phantoms’ or ‘angels’ flying through the dark skies in silent flocks. 

I climbed a steep hillside to enjoy a misty, pale view westwards over miles of woodland and villages. I rested on a bench, poured a cup of coffee from my flask, and gazed out over a landscape that felt far more like home than it had done twelve months ago. 

I got a positive feeling about today’s grid square as soon as I arrived. On previous outings, I had often looked in this direction and thought, ‘It looks nice over that way.’The omens were promising with plenty of contour lines and no roads. 

A cluster of beehives stood in the corner of a field.The coming cool weather would soon quieten the hives, but today the sun was warm and the bees were busy. They fly tremendous distances, racking up round trips of up to ten miles to forage for food. Each jar of honey contains nectar from two million flowers, with a corresponding flight distance of 90,000 miles, or more than three laps of the planet. Yet each bee produces only a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its life. So it is an extraordinary team effort that depends upon bees sharing information about the food sources they find, by ‘dancing’ for each other. 

The waggle dance involves flying in a straight line to show the direction of the food relative to the sun, then performing a series of 

loops related to the flowers’ quality. The bee also beats its wings and waggles its abdomen to create vibrations that give extra information about the nectar and pollen’s location. 

Bees are cooperative, communicative insects, complete with solar compasses, inbuilt clocks, the ability to communicate with plants via electric signals, and a sting in the tail. They pollinate most of our wild- flowers and many important crops. Bees are amazing. But after 100 million years, they are now at risk as we kamikaze towards ‘insectaged- don’ and the extinction of up to 70 percent of our wild species. 

hung upside down while it ate.

Riding here had been a confusing maze of winding lanes and high hedges, so I hadn’t yet orientated myself with any other familiar grid squares nearby. The road had been too narrow for cars to pass my bike safely, so I’d had to stop and tuck in whenever a vehicle appeared. This allowed me the chance for a blackberry update, nibbling one or two while I waited for each car to pass. A few were ripe and swollen, but most were still small green nubbins. 

My hopes were high. It was a perfect sunny day and the grid square looked enticing on paper. It was mostly woodland, with some contour lines, a small lake and the site of a Roman villa thrown in for luck. There was only one building on the whole square. A motorway and railway sliced through the middle, but a third of the area was a country park and all the rest was open countryside. I was looking forward to roving around a pleasant landscape dotted with enormous trees. 

And yet... 

And yet, it turned out that the solitary building was a historic manor house that owned most of the grid square and resolutely refused to share it with plebs like me. I was shunted away from the meadows and ancient trees by signs and fences, and ushered instead down an unattractive path squashed between the motorway and a metal fence. I hoped I could at least explore a small copse, but that turned out to belong to a golf course and was also off-limits. And the lake was ringed with forbidding notices from the fishing club that owned it. 

So far, the most enjoyable part of the outing had been standing on the motorway bridge and watching the hypnotic traffic hurtle beneath me. 

I began outside a working man’s club with a fluttering Union Jack, then rode among Victorian terraces, streets of post-war pebbledash, and 1980s semis. A brick clock tower had been built in the town cen- tre with the largesse of the local mill owner 150 years ago, and the mill’s chimneys still smoked away in the distance. There was the usual array of shops and eateries: convenience stores, kebabs, fried chicken, Chinese, Indian, garage doors (that was a first), and a bookmaker. It was a typical old-fashioned town of struggling shops and pubs sliding into decline, plus a shiny new Domino’s Pizza takeaway. 

An elderly man laboured across the street with his shopping trolley. A car slowed and waited an age for him to cross. ‘That will be me one day,’ I thought to myself, ‘sliding into decline.’ And, ‘Be grateful then for this moment,’ I reminded myself. This moment is my life 

I always enjoy daybreak, though doing the school run means I’m rarely free to head out and play at such an hour. But I managed it this morning and immediately felt I was winning the day. It took an hour to ride across my map to the grid square, and I had time to enjoy the sun rising, the rabbits in the fields, and the foxes slinking home after a big night out. 

‘Go for a look around the square, and after that you can go to the pub,’ I bargained with myself. 

It had been a warm and humid day between the heavy showers. Aside from traditional British grumbles, which we all enjoy, the weath- er had not actually been too bad recently compared with, say, the year 1816, when ash clouds from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia shrouded the world in an extended winter. Mount Tambora’s blast was heard 1,600 miles away and plunged the 350 miles around the volcano into darkness for two days. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history. 

Over the next year, a cloud of ash spread through the atmosphere,  wreaking havoc with the weather for three years. The resulting potato famine in Ireland led to a terrible outbreak of typhus and mass emi- gration. North America’s arable economy crashed, causing the panic of 1819 that pushed the country from being a commercial colony towards becoming an independent economy. In China, three consecutive har- vests failed, prompting farmers to plant poppies in place of rice, with far-reaching and long-lasting global consequences. 

But while Tambora’s eruption caused widespread famine and dis- ruption, the strange weather also influenced an output of poetic and musical works infused with gloomy genius and named for the Greek god of fire: Byron’s Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, and Schubert’s first commission, the cantata Prometheus, composed to a poem of the same name by Goethe. 

Volcanoes erupt now and then, and weather conditions also swing back and forth naturally, but sane people are in agreement that human behaviour is now causing climate breakdown far beyond natural var- iations. A clear and alarming demonstration of our extravagant and irresponsible way of life was the occurrence of ‘Earth Overshoot Day’. 

Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s annual demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what the planet can regenerate in that year. It means we’ve used up our sustainable bio- capacity for the year. We deal with the deficit for the rest of the year by borrowing from the future and gobbling limited reserves of ecological resources more quickly than they can be replaced, if at all. 

Qatar and Luxembourg’s Overshoot Days for the year were back in February. Britain’s was in May. The only reason the world’s Overshoot Day as a whole is as late as August is because the poorest countries are still living within their means. They prop us up, while also bearing most of the burden and consequences of climate change. 

Sustainable living dictates that you must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. We are clearly failing to do that. How long would you tolerate the behaviour of a friend who guzzled voraciously, overspent in his own interests, then came to you each August asking you to bail him out for the rest of the year? 

The last of the morning dew felt cool on my toes as I cycled down a grassy path in my flip- flops. In the crisp, brown fields, the harvest seemed to be ripening before my very eyes. A silence hung over the day, which reminded me of Spain. A distant voice carried from across the fields. I was roasting. And it was still early. I envied a buzzard whose feathers ruffled in a breeze as it perched on a pylon by the railway. 

I sat down on an overgrown, underused bench outside a derelict timber-framed pub to squeeze out my socks. The men in hi-vis jackets from the water board had warned of a deep flood on the road, but I thought, ‘Come on, lads, how deep can it be?’ and pedalled on. 

‘Pretty deep,’ was the answer. 

Now I had wet shoes and socks for squelching around today’s grid square. Well done, me! 

Unique on my map, but very welcome, was a long strip of grass beside the road. It would not have been of much interest except that it was marked on the map as ‘land available for access on foot’. Beyond the slender threads of footpaths and the declining municipal parks, this was a rare example of the 8 percent of England that is open-access land for anyone to roam freely. 

I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt today and not even carrying a raincoat in my bag. The weather had rarely been so clement this year and I had been excited to get on my bike this morning. Yet although the weather was kind, the overgrown footpaths continued to be anything but. This was another week of hacking through brambles, squeezing past nettles and swatting mosquitoes in damp undergrowth. All this slashing and whacking and stinging felt like a jungle expedition, albeit a gentle one accompanied by 4G phone signal and the sound of motor- ways. I’m content that this is about as ferocious as the British country- side ever gets. 

Although today’s river was only a few hundred metres wide, I wasn’t brave enough to swim or canoe across it. The brown water swirled and boiled with eddies and undertows, and ships ploughed up and down. Even the ferry struggled, crossing the current in a wide, swerving arc. 

As the ferry slowed down to dock, I looked back across the river at the landscapes I had been linking this year. I enjoyed seeing those con- nections from this fresh perspective, noting how this place joined onto that place. I wheeled my bike down a causeway of riveted girders, over tidal mud and shopping trolleys, then pedalled away from the ferry. 

A cockerel crowed from behind a nearby hedge, jubilant not to have been fried. I rarely heard cockerels around here, but the sound reminded me of travels in other countries, of pre-dawn wake ups in the Philippines and the potholed roads of rural Nicaragua. 

I didn’t go out today to explore a grid square as usual, but to see the squares between the squares. I’d found myself with the rare but joyous occurrence of a weekend afternoon all to myself, so decided to go for a bike ride to calm my nerves before the big football match in the evening. I wasn’t playing and was merely preparing to take my seat in front of the TV with beer in hand and loud opinions galore. But the game was still all I could concentrate on. 

I headed out after lunch to see how many of the grid squares that I’d visited I could link together in an afternoon. I would ride through as many as possible before I ran out of time, and then zoom home for kick-off. It would be interesting to take stock of all I’d seen so far. 

Down in the distance I could see the city’s gleaming towers, shim- mering in the midsummer haze. I lay still for a while, listening, hov- ering above myself in my mind’s eye, allowing myself to settle into the grid square and its vibe. I heard birdsong and the hum of a motorway. ‘The language of birds is very ancient,’ wrote Gilbert White in a letter. ‘Little is said, but much is meant and understood.’ 

This meant that if I found a square underwhelming, with little to interest me, the responsibility was likely to be mine. Was how much I saw dependent on how much I looked? Some squares buoyed my mood, while others merely matched it. A boring square wasn’t its fault; it was my fault. I knew that as I struggled lethargically round today’s streets, but I also excused myself on the grounds of illness. 

I had sweated and shivered through the night, unable to sleep. In the morning, I went to make myself some toast, but we’d run out of bread. I dragged myself to the shed to do some work, but after an inef- fectual hour of pretending to write this book, I tried to salvage some- thing useful from the day by fetching my camera and cycling out to investigate a grid square.

One of my favourite smells is the air after a storm, the earthy scent of petrichor, from the Greek words petros (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods). We tend to think that our sense of smell is something to be sniffed at compared with the animal world’s, but we are astonishing- ly adept at detecting geosmin, the chemical released by dead microbes that is responsible for the heady smells of petrichor and pools of water. We can smell geosmin at a level of five parts per trillion – that’s thou- sands of times more sensitive than sharks are to the scent of blood. We may be so sensitive to it because detecting water on the savannah where we evolved was a vital evolutionary advantage. 

A row of houses had been built recently between the road and those wheat fields that had been forest back when the Romans carved through this land in the name of progress. The new-builds were extrav- agant expanses of glass and steel, with large gravel areas for parking multiple cars. Sparrows jostled noisily in pink rose bushes and pet- als fell among the squabbling. A placard in one garden campaigned 

Meadows 

against a ‘green belt grab’ that proposed to build 4,000 more homes around here. It summed up the difficulties of deciding where to build. This family was enjoying their new home but understandably didn’t want all the neighbouring fields to be built on as well. I don’t like the countryside being turned into towns, but I also want everyone to have a home. Answers on a postcard to your MP, please. 

My heart sank when I saw that the stream ran straight across a golf course. Golf courses are like a certain type of model. At first glance, your eyes light up at the swathes of undulating lushness. But your passion quickly plummets at the emptiness you find, the lack of nature beneath an artificial, preened veneer. The golf course did not bode well for my waterfalls. 

There used to be nine species of human. That we alone remain is testament to our aggressive, expansionist success, wiping out many species on our march to dominance, from dodos and all of Australia’s megafauna, to the recent ivory-billed woodpecker and splendid poison 

Swifts 

frog (the first two examples when I asked Google which species have gone extinct recently). We are uniquely dangerous. 

But our success over the other Homo species was also down to our superior skills of communication and community. Yes, we wreck everything, but we are also well suited to fixing problems, if only we choose to do so. We need now to tell the stories that will ignite every- body to care about the perilous state of nature and the impact its col- lapse is having on people across the world. And then we need our local, national and international communities to work together to turn that around. Will we choose to balance our remorseless progress with con- cern and empathy? 

A sign on the green said the village was supporting No Mow May, which explained why the grass was peppered with wildflowers. In Britain we revere short, stripy lawns. But the charity Plantlife urges us to enjoy the beauty and the wildlife benefits that come from allowing lawns, greens and verges to run a little wild for a month. After No Mow May, up to 200 species can be found flowering on lawns, including 

Buttercups 

such rarities as meadow saxifrage, knotted clover and eyebright, as well as an abundance of daisy, white clover and selfheal. The longer you leave a lawn unmown, the wider the range of plants, while cutting the grass every four weeks generates the greatest quantity of wildflowers and nectar. 

Given that it was early May, it was apt that the pub on today’s charming village green was called The Green Man. Appearing in vari- ous guises over time – usually a green head sprouting leaves and foliage – the Green Man used to be a central figure in May Day celebrations. 

Green Man 

His origins are murky, but he has been carved in churches and build- ings for a thousand years as a symbol of spring’s rebirth. The Romans had similar figures, as seen, for example, in Nero’s Golden House pal- ace. Bacchus, god of wine, nature and harvest, was often portrayed as a leaf-crowned lord, so he might be the ancestor of our Green Man. 

The Gaelic festival of Beltane was a forerunner of today’s numerous worldwide celebrations of May Day. It was a community celebration of summer’s return. The origin of the word Beltane is ‘bright fire’ and, as always, bonfires played an important role in the rituals. Revellers danced around purifying flames to welcome the lighter half of the year after the long winter. When farmers led their animals out to spring pastures, they made sure to drive them between two fires to bring good luck. 

George Orwell 

I tried to get a closer look at a 400kV electricity substation, but its mysteries were obscured by rings of trees because, between 1968 and 1973, an admirable 725,000 tall trees, 915,400 smaller trees and 17,600 ground cover plants were planted to screen substations across the land. 

My limited interest in infrastructure exhausted, I followed a cycle path alongside the dual carriageway, dodging broken bottles amid the traffic roar. The smells of warm tarmac and diesel brought back fond memories of cycling the world’s highways. I peered down from a bridge at an overgrown pond, thick with slime and dotted with traffic cones. Then I turned off at a slip road and rode into a town. There were large, 

Suburbs 

detached houses at the top of the hill, and the homes became smaller and closer together as I freewheeled down towards the town centre. A pony and trap cantered by, ridden by two young lads in vests, and trail- ing a patient line of backed-up traffic in its wake. I left the main road to go and cycle around some residential estates. 

Over the course of this year, I’d always enjoyed visiting grid squares that most approximated wild countryside. And I also liked the busy towns brimming with human life, beings equally intrigued by man- sions and poorer areas. Today I was bang in the middle, riding through street after street of suburban homes. 

‘I’m on a bloody footpath!’ I yelled back, both because I was angry and because the man leaning out of his 4x4 window was far away on the road. 

It was an ineffective, hard to hear argument, so I just turned my back on the irate driver and continued following the path across a grassy field. I hate any form of confrontation – even a cross tweet upsets me all day. But this one particularly annoyed me because I was on a public footpath. 

I would have understood the landowner’s anger had there been no right of way and I was trampling crops, tearing up the land on a motor- bike, dropping litter or worrying livestock. But his assumption that he had more right than me to the earth, wind, sun or sky irritated me. 

Bluebells 

We all need to access the natural world for our enjoyment and health, and if enough of us develop a connection with nature we might be able to reverse its destruction. But our history and laws have put so much of the countryside in the hands of so few people, that we have allowed a culture to establish where going for a walk is seen as invasive or damaging. 

This ‘get off my land’ ticking-off put me in a blue mood when I should have been enjoying the clear blue skies and the bloom of blue- bells. And it was a shame, because I could see that a lot of trees had been planted here – something that always lifts my spirits – so the landowner and I probably had far more in common than the gulf of our shouting match suggested. Had we chatted congenially and disagreed agreeably, the two of us would more than likely have ended up cheering for trees but feeling frustrated at government feet-dragging. 

For example, one tree-loving landowner told me they tried to plant 200 acres of woodland, aided by receiving a grant that didn’t make the venture profitable or even balance the books, but at least made it man- ageable for them to do the right thing for the land. But they were then told to apply for planning permission to plant the wood. By the time it came through, policies had changed and the planting grant had been withdrawn, leaving them with tens of thousands of tree whips sitting in their greenhouses. It is so frustrating to hear stories like this. 

• ‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.’ – Carl Sagan 

• ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.’ – W.B. Yeats 

• ‘The more you read, the more things that you will know. The more you learn, the more places you’ll go.’ – Dr Seuss

These are brilliant quotes for an education built on curiosity not box-ticking, but they also summed up what fascinated me about div- ing into my map. 

My computer calendar already reminds me of the various dates of the first snowdrop and daffodil outside my shed in recent years. The first green leaf on the tree by my window, the return of goldfinches to my feeder, the first swift and, from today, the first brimstone butterfly. I enjoy seeing these differences in nature’s calendar year on year, the phenology of where I live. 

It is a start, but my novice observations are a long way from those 

Vineyards 

of the Reverend Gilbert White, whose detailed decades of notes about the natural world around his village resulted in The Natural History of Selborne, a book that has remained continuously in print since 1789. He was a pioneering and inquisitive natural historian with astonishing powers of observation. His writing also offers an invaluable insight into rural life in the 18th century. It was often carried by emigrants to North America and Australia who wanted a nostalgic reminder of home. 

White paid minute attention to nature and recorded it diligent- ly, a practice he called ‘observing narrowly’. The more he focused, the more engrossed he became in the small wonders on his doorstep in Hampshire. For example, he observed that owls hoot in the note of B flat and surmised that willow wrens were actually three separate species by tiny differences in their songs and plumage: chiffchaff, willow war- bler and wood warbler. I’m quite proud of myself if I even glimpse one of those as they dash from bush to bush, never mind playing spot the difference between them. 

Now I heard the year’s first chiffchaff chirping away, a call like a tiny blacksmith hammering an anvil all day long, ‘chiff-chaff-chiff- chaff ’. It is easily confused with the great tit’s ‘teach-er teach-er’ chirp. Not many people get excited by a little brown bird with a monotonous song. But I enjoyed celebrating a feisty six-gram bird that had flown all 

Houses 

the way here from Africa. I was becoming aware of so many things that had passed me by in all my decades alive. The sense of amazement was boosted by small new abilities such as distinguishing a chiffchaff from a great tit by their songs. 

I arrived in today’s grid square down a busy road, cars swooping back and forth, that demanded all my concentration. A workman bat- tered the pavement with a pneumatic drill, and I had to turn off the road onto a quiet street of new houses before I could quieten my mind and settle into the slow rhythm of exploring. 

Just a stone’s thrown from the railway station, this cul-de-sac was prime real estate for wealthy people commuting into the city. The homes were huge, with oversized cars parked outside. But all this big- ness came at the expense of any outdoor space. They had squeezed ten identical buildings onto a plot of land that would have been the size of one garden for a home like this in earlier times. This tug between houses and space was to be a recurring theme on today’s ride. 

Completing today’s bucolic scene was an old flint-and-brick oast house. Buildings like these were once used to dry hops for brewing beer, so the distinctive conical shape is common in hop-growing areas. I set off along a narrow lane beneath an archway of hedges and trees. A notice pinned to a fence said ‘Do not feed horses no carrot or apple.’ Horses’ hooves had chewed the earth to sloppy mud, so I picked my way carefully down the edge. 

A red sign declaring ‘PRIVATE GROUNDS’ was nailed to an old 

Pigs 

beech tree on the edge of a copse. ‘NO THRU ACCESS’ read another. ‘PRIAVATE [sic]. NO PARKING. RESIDENTS ONLY’ warned a third. Even where there were footpaths, it felt as though they’d been allowed only grudgingly, with fences and cautionary signs keeping me strictly on the narrowest strip of land it was possible to walk on. It was a cheerless affair, a mean-spirited granting of minimal space. At one point the path became a claustrophobic tunnel between high fence panels that was barely wide enough for my shoulders. 

A heron circled overhead, stately and assured. Black-and-white tufted ducks careened in, to land with a waterski skid. Coots drifted over the smooth surface. They always draw a wry reminiscence from me because a thousand lifetimes ago I studied the ‘agonistic commu- nication’ of coots for my university dissertation, whatever that means. But my heart had already clocked off from academia by then and I was getting ready to hit the road. I had requested to do my fieldwork in Africa, sniffing the opportunity to wangle an adventure out of a degree. But the professor was wise to my scheming and I was unceremoniously packed off to sit by a chilly Edinburgh duckpond for weeks, much like the one I’d discovered today. I smiled at my youthful disappointment 

and turned away from the coots.

In Finland, February is Helmikuu, the month of the pearl, when snow melts on branches and forms droplets. In Poland it is Luty, mean- ing freezing cold. For Macedonians, it is the month of felling trees and chopping wood, Sechko. 

I was definitely in a mud month here, rather than a pearl month. The mountains may have been calling, but they felt farther away than ever. I had one of my occasional bouts of wondering if I should give up limiting myself to this single map. 

‘What a stupid idea all this is,’ I moaned. ‘It’s cold. It’s wet. I could either be in bed or in Bali.’ 

The south of England being a mild sort of place, the best I hope for each year is a covering of a few inches, a couple of sledging outings and a day or two of jolly disruption. Today, after weeks of rain, I was excited to get out into the snow that had fallen overnight, not least of all because I had also noticed the dawn arriving a little earlier. It was nice to get away from the daily grind of book-writing in my shed. Snow makes everything feel more adventurous, though the sprinkling here 

couldn’t compare to the majesty of hauling a sledge across Greenland’s vast silence, relishing being self-contained with a couple of friends and very far from civilisation. But I was still thrilled. 

‘As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens’ goes the proverb, with a nod to scientific veracity. Earth receives the least sunlight at the winter solstice, yet the coldest temperatures come later, a seasonal lag caused by more solar energy leaving the atmosphere than arriving. Today, the snow muffled the world and quietened everything. I could hear a buzzard and the cawing of rooks, but the usual motorways and sirens sounded softer. 

It is the gloom that does for me in winter. Seven of my past eight grid squares had been grey and wet, in a winter where the rain never ended and the sun never shone. I was sagging like a feeble houseplant, pale and etiolated owing to lack of light. If I could hibernate until spring returned, I would. 

I dearly wished to dig out my passport and head somewhere far away where sunlight shone hot on my back. California called. Emigration enticed. Marrakesh, maybe? I find the dark half of the year harder to endure every year. But just when I am about to crack, I recognise tiny changes heralding the approach of spring and the return of all good things. 

So it encouraged me to hear a definite increase in birdsong this morning, a ratcheting up of woodland activity. Perhaps life was 

Coppicing 

returning, and perhaps my own life was too. For today was Imbolc, the Gaelic festival celebrating the onset of spring that occurs halfway between the solstice and the equinox. 

I turned right at the church into a maze of terraced streets. In one house I saw a dozen trophies shining in an upstairs window. A child’s bedroom, I guessed, proud of their efforts and achievement. An enor- mous railway embankment towered above the houses and overshad- owed the streets. It led onto a viaduct whose ten arches were visible from grid squares for miles around. I was understanding the lie of the land better now, getting a clearer idea of how all these places fitted 

together.

My outings had recalibrated my preconceptions about how much of my map was covered with concrete and shown that much still lent itself to vigorous, solitary hikes. Though moulded by man – absolute- ly – the countryside is not irrevocably wrecked, even in this crowded corner of the country. 

The January sun, when it eventually showed up, skulked low and reluctant across the sky. There had been a roaring in the wind all night and the rain fell in floods. And now in the morning I was on my way masochistically to what looked to be one of the most nature-deplet- ed squares on my map, in one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet. This crowded map lies on the outskirts of a large city, so there are many pressures on its space, including farming, transport, 

Gardens 

industry, housing, and recreation. Everywhere you look, you see human impacts on the landscape, ranging from landfill sites to relaid hedges. 

There was little need for the cartographer to use any green ink here; the whole square was a grey grid of boxes representing buildings. Colour came only from two busy roads, marked in yellow. There were just four scraps of footpath, little more than a couple of hundred metres of cracked tarmac, broken glass and dog mess. I felt in more need than usual of nature’s gladness, but could I find any of it here? 

The tragedy of the commons, that individuals ignore what is best for society in pursuing personal gain, suggests that humans can- not manage a common resource. Why do we care so little about the Earth? Is it because we assume it is limitless? Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s perspective on Earth changed after flying to space. He said, ‘You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.” ’ 

Why do we care so little about nature and its tragic decline? Is it because we have stopped noticing it? It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. It is not that the world is too small, but that we miss so much of it. 

Out of all the country’s maps, mine was down in the rubbish rel- egation zone for adventure potential. But that also made this project a more universal one than if I lived, say, on map 402 in the scenic Scottish Highlands or map 24 in the Peak District. 

With practice, a map becomes as clear as a picture, and almost as full of imagined detail. This week’s grid square seemed to be as hilly as almost anywhere on my map, a rare treat for me in this flat, sanitised region. I adore land with contour lines, curvy and sensuous, filled with possibility. 

Taking just a few minutes every month to climb a tree, which I’d done for the past three years, had certainly made me happier. Each time I returned to the tree I was surprised by how much nature had changed in the past few weeks. Fun, too, had been my year of full-moon forays, getting outdoors for a run, ride, walk or swim on every full moon, and also a year of enjoying coffee outside at least monthly. If hospital gar- dens help people to heal, if doctors now prescribe exercise in nature, and if the ‘Natural Health Service’ addresses a range of conditions, then committing to fifty-two outdoor missions sounded like a sensible 

undertaking. By now the habit of heading out once a week with my camera and notebook felt comfortably established. 

It was a flat, grey day beneath a flat, grey December sky. The river flowing through today’s square was flat and grey, rippling as the tide nurdled ever lower. My mood, however, was neither flat nor grey. I was looking forward to this one. 

If I was the sort of man who had a Top Ten ranking of trees in my head (and I am that sort), then I’d rank the yew far down the list. They look gloomy, suck away sunshine, and are hard to climb. 

Henry David Thoreau 

(and some moaning about fly-tipping!)

It was unremarkable: there was nothing to remark on. It was the ideal place to begin. If this first outing was too boring for me on my boring map, then it would certainly be too boring for you, and that would be the end of the book straightaway. 

I folded up the map and headed out to have a look at nothing. 

However, my mood has shifted, like many people’s. With the climate in chaos, I can’t justify flying all over the globe for fun anymore, burning jet fuel and spewing carbon for selfies. It feels particularly inappropriate as I write books that encourage everyone to get out and explore. If I love wild places so much, was I willing to not visit them in order to help protect them?