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There is an intriguing and beautiful valley between the western flanks of the Black Mountains and their offspring outliers, Mynydd Troed and Mynydd Llangorse. From above, it is a gentle green valley of woods and scattered farm buildings far below the great broad shoulders that the table topped peaks of the Black Mountains thrust out into it. The bracken-covered hillsides are generously spun with lovely grassy tracks and deep lonnins covered over by trees, some almost entirely blocking out the daylight. Occasionally they emerge from the trees to reveal deserted farmhouses or plush cottages. At the bottom end of the valley is the

A number of times over the past dozen years I have been summoned to mid-Wales to undertake a rather unusual Rights of Way survey. It is the same as many others I have done except the paths just aren’t there, so it feels like walking a series of notional lines on a map which may as well have been made up (which in many cases they were, as plenty of Welsh landowners have been keen to tell me). However, every so often – in between vaulting perilous fences, pushing through thorny hedgerows and squelching through knee-deep muddy fields – surprising features are revealed in a landscape that, when I do manage to take the time to look around me, is as beautiful as anywhere I can imagine. There are none of the bare rocks of Snowdonia, but Powys is just as dramatic in its way, a constant procession of smooth hills and deep valleys bounding as far as the eye can see.

It was probably not the day many of us had imagined when we signed up for the Celebrating Woodland Heritage survey at Hardcastle Crags, a small hardy group of us gathering in the car park amid light but persistent rain. Snow had been forecast but only touched the higher ground, and down here the slushy wetness lent the woods a sombre air. Alfie looked miserable and stood shivering while gazing wistfully at distant squirrels.

Dawn on December 21st is at 8.23am in West Yorkshire, late enough to allow even those out the night before to join in the winter solstice celebrations. I have been invited to join a large group of Calder Valley fellrunners “aiming to see if Chris Goddard is right about the sun rising out of the Miller’s Grave on the Winter Solstice”. There is not a little pressure here, but I feel confident enough that I won’t be lynched if it turns out to be an erroneous claim.

The West Yorkshire Woods had been out all of a week when my friend Mark looked at it and remarked ‘I see you haven’t found the cross in Tinker Bank Wood.’ I thought I had, but it turns out I was wrong. A few days later I explored the overgrown corner of the wood he’d specified and, sure enough, I found an obvious cross base covered in moss. I felt like saying, ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me earlier?’ – after all we’d been out exploring Tom Bell’s Cave together not long before – but of course there are hundreds of sites I still don’t know about in the woods and moors I claim to have mapped to the point of exhaustion.