On the very edge of England, in the sort of perfect pastoral country that you think only exists in dreams, Llansilin lies on a gentle slope, the chief village in this remote valley of the River Cynlleth. Whitewashed or silver stoned foursquare houses with black paint work and slate roofs, some with ivy clad  walls or  privet topiary in their front gardens, cluster around a small  triangle of green. It is like many unspoilt villages in Wales with its black and white painted  pub, its 1920s snowcemmed school and school house, its half timbered village hall advertising indoor bowls, girl guides, keep fit classes and whist drives, its reserved Bethsheda chapel dated 1832 and its half crescent of good looking (apart from the plastic windows) colour washed council houses.  >

Beside  the village of Houghton, where Arthur Rackham lived during the 1920s,  the South Downs way dips down from the wooded heights of Houghton Forest to cross the wide river valley of the Arun  and rises sharply again towards Amberley Mount.  Reedy, ditched  water meadows with clumps of yellow flags in spring stretch either side of the river as it loops  on down through Arundel to Littlehampton and the sea. Wigeon, teal, redshanks and snipe live here. If you stand on the long stone bridge and look down stream you will see North Stoke, centre stage, on a chalk promontory above the first extravagant river bend –as though it were an island. >

After the small fields of County Letrim the country around Florence Court grows bigger and bolder. The long road from Eniskillen to Sligo winds on between silver birches, sudden outcrops of bungalows like randomly scattered igloos on the emerald fields and one street villages with rainbow colour washed houses. Nearer to the house the signs of expensive husbandry begin – tall trees rise from the hedgerows around the entrance lodges and the drive leads you into one of the most magical landscapes in the world. >

When the first breath of virtual summer blazes over England  on an early spring day, I head for a river.  My nearest good river country is around the western hem of the Cotswolds where the upper reaches of the Thames wind down from  Inglesham, and rivers like the  Coln and Leach wander through  willowy meadows, affording brilliant bathing places.  It’s much too cold to swim, but just right  for sitting on the banks of the river Windrush at one of my favourite pubs in the land with  friends at my side, the sun on my back and a glass in my hand  For me its as good as England gets. >

We took the night sleeper from Euston toInverness. The fact that we were jolted awake at dawn just short of Killiecrankie by a boulder colliding with our engine which caused the  brakes to lock on violently, only served to heighten our sense of adventure. Having been shunted into Blair Atholl, we changed trains and chugged on through the gloomy looking Cairngorms, rising brown against the steel grey sky and arrived in Inverness in time for a full Scottish  breakfast in the Station Hotel – a glorious building with  wall to wall tartan carpet and willowy waiters straight out of a Noel Coward play. We then  travelled onBritain’s most northerly railway, begun in 1861 when the  Ness Viaduct was built.  Another world unfurled as we passed along the  shores of Beauly Firth  to  Muir of Ord, a century ago the cattle centre for Scotland. >

In an ideal world this is what you should  do on a Thursday evening in high summer. Take the footpath  in the shelter of  fern stuffed Cornish “hedges” , up the long slow  hill from Port Quin, leaving  Varley Head and Reedy Cliff to be battered by Atlantic waves and the lichen-encrusted farm buildings of Roscarrock settled on the slope above  you. From  the edge of a cornfield, a mile or so on towards Port Isaac, the first magical view of the coast unfurls from Delabole Point to Tintagel Head. Over a slate style, the  trickle of a shale-y, sandy  path way leads down to a stream dark in the shade of oaks and then up between blackberry bushes to the trig point.  The last slithery descent under a tunnel of evergreen oak and hazel, stunted by storms, has been worn deep  by centuries of travelers and cattle and opens out  high  above the sheltered harbour  of Port Isaac , sandwiched between black cliffs. >

As children we used to call it  “ Kingston Bagpipes” : I never knew why. Lately  I found out that there had been an airfield here  during the Second World War and that the ground crew who occupied a mass of nissen huts in  the Park of Kingston Bagpuize House  were Scottish.  The wailing of  their bagpipes echoed all down  the village.

In this flat uneventful stretch of Oxfordshire   the airfield has  long since been ploughed over, the nissen huts razed to the ground and a new avenue re-instated in the park . The long straggling village,  which used to straddle the main road between Swindon and Oxford is bypassed now, and although the orange light of the huge new  roundabout nearby  gives off a false sunset all  through the night, the place is peaceful. >

Alton Priors and Alton Barnes are really one village; a straggle of thatched cottages, a manor farm, a 1953 village hall and two churches set in a loose circle around willowy meadows. They lie in the Pewsey Vale which divides the barren uplands of the Marlborough Downs from the immense loneliness of Salisbury Plain. Woodborough Hill, sculpted with strip lynchets, guards the Altons from the south-west wind while to the north, a chain of voluptuous hills, Golden Ball Hill, Knap Hill, Walkers Hill and Milk Hill, rises in an undulating wave from sloping pastureland.  >

Five years ago, I was one of a  motley gaggle of writers  keen to ply their wares at the Althorp Literary Festival and lucky enough to be asked to stay in the  house  itself with the Spencer family. This was wish fulfilment indeed.  Several years before  I had ridden on a horse around  the outskirts of  Althorp’s vast estate  when journeying from Wiltshire to Nottinghamshire. At the edge of a dark wood beyond Nobottle I remember catching a fleeting and tantalizing glimpse of Althorp’s chimneys  in the far distance. Had I dared, I would have ridden the long length of the drive to get a closer look – what more fitting way after all than to arrive at a stately home on a horse?  >

The British public may have been seduced by the great glass domes that are the Eden Project but the palm house at Bicton still remains  one of the most remarkable and beautiful glass buildings in the country. Its curvilinear trefoil shape is spectacular. Built around 1818, the technology of its construction was so advanced for its time that even today, the glass firm of Pilkintons are hesitant to take on its restoration. “If anything went wrong or got damaged, we just wouldn’t know how to put it together again,” they said. >