Inside A Mountain: walking real and imaginary landscape with Charlie Lee-Potter

Samantha Ellis, an Iraqi Jew and second-generation refugee, has never been to the country she longs to see. Her new memoir, Chopping Onions on My Heart, is a personal story of her family's flight from Iraq as well as a reckoning with the loss of their language of Judeo Iraqi Arabic. It's a deeply intelligent book which wrestles with the idea of home and how we preserve culture. Samantha and I took...

Prize-winning poet Penny Boxall has spent the past year as writer-in-residence at Wytham Woods in Oxford, studying soil. The results - a series of decomposing poems - are her farewell gift to the woods: buried poems, submerged poems, and poems written on fruit. As Penny finishes her residency, Charlie begins her own at Wytham. On a sunny autumn day, they walked the woods together with spade and ha...

Multimedia artist Fungai Marima printing her work Burn Out on an etching press Fungai Marima is a prize-winning multimedia artist who specialises in printmaking and live performance. She uses her body in her work, imprinting it on glass or onto metal etching plates to express her sense of solidarity with those who've endured abuse and cruelty. Her work is visceral and sometimes disturbing and yet...

  The writer Noreen Masud was brought up in Lahore with her three sisters. When she was a teenager, and with no warning, her doctor father banished them from Pakistan and, since then, she's created a life for herself as an academic. But now suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, Noreen compulsively seeks out flat places in the landscape - bare spaces where she can see for miles and...

Artist Jake Tilson doesn't care if his projects take decades to complete - in fact, he likes it when they do. He's just finished recreating his vision of Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, an art project which took him years and involved walking around the market for thousands of miles. His recent solo show, which included miniature recreations of some of Tsukiji's 1,700 fish stalls, was a triumph of i...

Jade Angeles Fitton had been living a frenetic, toxic life in London, trapped in an abusive relationship and seemingly willingly to continue living that way. But, having been abandoned in a remote Devon barn when the relationship finally collapsed for good, she discovers the powerful consolation that silence can bring. Living as a hermit, she relishes the soothing solace of living alone and speaki...

This episode takes a walk, but a very short one. That's because my companion is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, professor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2017. The disease has wrecked his capacity to walk more than a few hundred metres - and wonky, clumsy metres at that. But Robert has substituted physical walks with imaginative ones, scanning his min...

SERIES 2 Episode 2: Night Walking with Anthologist Duncan Minshull The writer Duncan Minshull has compiled five anthologies about walking, the latest being Where My Feet Fall. In this episode, Duncan and Charlie explore the streets of London at night to see what effect the darkness has on the way they think. There's a long tradition of writers and artists walking at night: Charles Dickens, Virgini...

SERIES 2 Episode 1: Dodging Falling Trees with Ian McMillan  The poet Ian McMillan, presenter of The Verb on BBC Radio 3 and poet-in-residence at Barnsley Football Club, tells stories by the yard - eccentric, ridiculous, compassionate and wise. Ian has lived in the same South Yorkshire village of Darfield his entire life and writes about it with a unique mix of pride and hilarity. He's a performan...

EPISODE 6 Tom Chivers' book London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City is erudite and meticulously researched, but it's also funny, poetic and at times very moving. Tom digs down below the surface of the city to find its ancient, lost rivers, whilst also examining his own past. The book is part geological, part historical, and part reflective.  In this episode, Tom and Charlie explore an ancient, subt...

EPISODE 5 Marcus du Sautoy, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, has the kind of imagination which draws on complex mathematics, music, science and literature simultaneously. On this walk through a North London park, Marcus and Charlie cover both literal and imaginative ground - and one of them gets lost in the marshes.   Marcus with one of his beloved yel...

EPISODE 4 The acclaimed cellist Natalie Clein talks about her music and explains what creativity means to her. Returning to her childhood home on the Dorset coast, she walks with Charlie and they find a tent of trees in the woods.    MUSIC:  Bloch, Ligeti & Dallapiccola: Suites for Solo Cello Hyperion Records.  Cello: Natalie Clein https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68155   Rebecca...

EPISODE 3 Kate Kennedy has written a mesmerising and deeply moving book about the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, Dweller in Shadows. Gurney's life was beset by mental illness, disappointment and the trauma of war. He spent the last fifteen years of his life in an asylum, separated from the Gloucestershire countryside which shines from his work. In this episode Kate and Charlie explore the same fie...

EPISODE 2 Botanical artist and illustrator Anna Koska uses the ancient, but now rare, medium of egg tempera to create beautiful paintings of the natural world. In this episode she and Charlie take a walk along the coast and find wild garlic, sea kale and an exquisite bird's nest. Anna takes a wild, icy swim, explains how she's developed her unique method of painting, and reads from her new book Fr...

EPISODE 1 The writer Sally Bayley had a chaotic, deprived childhood in a household of 12 children and 3 adults. But since placing herself in care at the age of 14, she's gone on to teach English Literature at Oxford and to find a new way of writing fiction. Her books Girl with Dove and No Boys Play Here conjure imaginary and literary landscapes for Sally, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Falstaff...