Open Country

Charlotte Smith goes on a trip down memory lane, visiting St Davids in Pembrokeshire. It's the area where she spent many of her childhood summer holidays - but a place she hasn't been back to in forty years. She meets the family still running the farm and campsite where she used to stay as a child, learns how to forage for food in rock pools along the shore, and discovers that the 21st century has...

Helen Mark discovers the fascinating world of the UK's largest ship's graveyard Purton Hulks, the largest collection of maritime wrecks above water in Britain. What began as the intentional beaching of a small fleet of semi-redundant timber lighters in the winter of 1909 to strengthen the nearby eroding canal bank eventually grew into 81 vessels that and today represents the largest collection of...

Lundy Island sits just off the North Devon Coast in the Bristol Channel. It has a fascinating history which dates back to the Bronze Age and has been home to pirates and outlaws. Previous owners have even had their own stamps and coinage produced but today it is managed by the Landmark Trust and the island and its surrounding waters are recognised for their rich wildlife and habitat. David Lindo v...

Writer Jonathan Gornall has attempted to row across the Atlantic twice. On the second attempt he nearly drowned but his relationship with the sea has continued. Today he spends his time at Pin Mill in Suffolk where he has just built a small sailing boat for his daughter and he hopes the boat will teach her to love the sea too. Helen Mark meets him and the boat building community who live beside th...

Helen Mark explores landscapes of the future, of the imagination and of the past, at the Great Exhibition of the North, which is centred in Newcastle and Gateshead. It's a three-month celebration of the impact of northern England's creators, inventors, artists and designers. Helen meets environmental artist Steve Messam to hear his sound sculpture 'Whistle', a series of steam engine whistles echoi...

On the bicentenary of Humphry Repton's death Helen Mark finds out all about the landscape gardener and his red books. Humphry Repton is the last English landscape designers of the eighteenth century, often regarded as the successor to Capability Brown. He created over 400 designs across Britain and Ireland and it was Repton who coined the phrase 'landscape gardener'. His trademark was the red book...

Gertrude Jekyll was born in the late 19th Century and, as a talented gardener and craftswoman, managed to forge a highly successful path in a male-dominated world. This year marks the 175th anniversary of Gertrude's birth. Helen Mark heads to sunny Godalming in Surrey, to visit the home and gardens where Ms Jekyll defined her gardening style, bred new plant varieties, developed a life-long partner...

Helen Mark explores the site of the former Copperworks near Swansea. As the huge mechanical puppet 'The Man Engine' visits to celebrate that great history of innovation and industry we look at how the geology of Wales has shaped its landscape but also its culture. Professor Daniel Williams tells Helen about how heavy industry here had a global impact and how it continues to influence Welsh culture...

Lincolnshire is famous for vast fields of tulips, but this week Helen Mark meets people in the country who have a more personal relationship with flowers, including a family whose snowdrop wood is the location for a naming ceremony for their daughter, conducted by a Druid named Kevin. Helen contemplates the fading of memories with a Greek artist and choreographer, resident in Lincoln, who makes ph...

Actress Dominique Moore visits forests, moors and parkland around Doncaster to find out how young people here are using the countryside. Rural landscapes in this area tend to be sandwiched between motorways, airports and industrial parks, but there are places to escape for a breath of fresh air, if you look carefully. And in Bawtry Forest, you won't just find trees. You might also bump into a coup...

Helen Mark explores the landscape in between the city of Coventry and the countryside which surrounds it. These 'edgelands' are often ignored yet they are also places which inspire artists and writers and can tell us about how we live today. Tile Hill is the place which the artist George Shaw depicts in his work and inspired by him poet Liz Berry has written about these 'edgelands' and the stories...

Ian Marchant has always longed to visit the Inner Hebridean island of Gigha, off the west coast of Scotland. For a writer and hippie like Ian, it sounds like a dream: an island owned and run by its own community of fewer than 170 people. No more exploitative or neglectful landlords; everyone has a say in how things are done and they all live happily ever after. But also, no more wealthy and benevo...

Ealing girl Konnie Huq finds out more about her favourite green spaces in London - Kew Gardens and Northala Fields. Konnie's late mother often took the family to Kew Gardens as it reminded her of her childhood in Bangladesh. Konnie goes back to Kew to revisit memories of her mother with her sister Nutun, before meeting scientists and horticulturalists to discover more about the work that goes on b...

Strathpeffer in the Highlands of Scotland is one of the few remaining strongholds of the elusive Scottish wildcat. The species is now considered to be rarer than the tiger with estimates of between 40 and 400 wildcats left in the wild. The reason that these estimates vary so widely is that the creatures are very hard to spot and that they are often mixed up with large feral or hybrid cats who are...

The crumbling Jurassic Coast in Dorset has already helped us to discover some of the most interesting species from deep time, revolutionising our understanding of dinosaurs and the prehistoric landscape. The latest important fossil to be found along this stretch of coastline is not a huge dinosaur but a tiny mammal. Grant Smith recently found the fossilised teeth of a small rodent like creature wh...

The writer and walker Linda Cracknell joins Helen Mark along North Devon's exposed and rugged coast to seek out the traces of her maritime roots. Her family sailed out of Braunton on the Torridge and Taw. This estuary, which drains large parts of Exmoor and Dartmoor, has the second largest tidal range in the world, and Linda is fascinated by the intertidal zone that's exposed at low tide, a place...

Helen Mark travels to Sussex to explore the wilderness at Knepp Castle Estate. Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell have turned their estate which was once intensively farmed over to a rewilding project since 2001. Isabella takes Helen to her favourite part of the landscape which has undergone the greatest change since they started restoring the land back to it's natural and uncultivated...

Helen Mark is in Formby in Merseyside, a part of the country that is regarded as a haven for the native red squirrel. She discovers what it is about the landscape and the practices conservationists have adopted, which some find controversial, that's allowing the native reds to thrive in this part of the country. Continuing along the Sefton coastline Helen meets a local resident turned poet; she di...

Adrian Goldberg travels around Birmingham meeting with fellow Brummies, all of whom have a special vision for the future of Birmingham's landscape. He begins on a huge piece of blank wasteland in the very heart of the city centre which is waiting to become the home of the Birmingham terminal for HS2. He's joined by Waheed Nazir from Birmingham City Council to consider how the anticipation of HS2 i...

The Irish border is currently the focus of intense negotiations around Brexit. Nobody knows how a soft or hard Brexit will work in practise but most agree that a hard border will negatively affect both the economies and relationships of the Republic and Northern Ireland. Helen Mark delves beneath the politics to discover the wildness of the land along the border and talks to the people who live th...

Helen Mark meets people whose livelihoods depend on the unique landscape of the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. She finds rock that looks like snakeskin, otherwise known as serpentine, and hears a dragon breathing. Possibly. It's all a bit reptilian. The Lizard is the most southerly point of England and it's probably not named after serpentine, the snakeskin-like rock that's found here, and nowhere...

Meditation, a celebration, a warning, the marking of a solemn occasion, music: bells are a public sound that changes according to the landscape. And bell-ringing in Devon is unique: it all sounds a bit trance, according to Mary Ward-Lowery. She hears other mind-bending sounds in this programme, including the noisy tramping of ants' feet and the peaceful fusion of bells and birdsong. With artist Ma...

High Pike in the Lake District is far from the highest peak Sir Chris Bonington has scaled yet from its summit he can see some of the most magnificent views in the Northern Fells and the place he calls home. Helen Mark attempts to keep up with one of the UK's most renowned mountaineers as they climb High Pike together and discovers, not just his incredible story of love and loss but also his passi...

How do you keep history alive? It's claimed the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh - fought in 1547 between the Scots and the English - has largely been forgotten despite being the largest Battle fought on Scottish soil. Helen Mark travels to Musselburgh in East Lothian to see re-enactors gather from across the UK to live as the forces did and fight to the (acted) death to remember the battle in front of an...

Tughall Mill in Northumberland has just been bought by the National Trust for £1.5million so what do you get for that amount of money? Helen Mark gets an exclusive first look around the 200 acre site which includes a stretch of the coast which is home to a breeding colony of little terns - our second rarest seabird. She meets the rangers who've been camping on the shore for months protecting the t...