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I dug out a pair of shorts to welcome in June. My legs shone ala- baster white, brighter than the day’s glorious sun. The lightness I felt inside made me aware of how sluggish I had been throughout the dark half of the year. Today, though, I was alert and enthusiastic. Even bet- ter, a chalk stream kissed the corner of today’s grid square. So I began there, with the banks shaded by overhanging wil...

I found an elevated spot where I could peep through the fence and look down on the new town being built across this blank grid square. Yet my map has never been blank. Even our brief history here stretches back hundreds of thousands of years to the Neanderthal hand axes dis- covered nearby, tools once used to butcher animals and make clothes. I’ve heard that sort of fact so often that it didn’t pa...

You should sit in nature for twenty minutes every day, they say, unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour. I sat for a while on the bench on a small, triangular village green because I thought I was too busy to be doing this today. It was a cold and blustery morn- ing, so I was wearing a hat and gloves again and hunkering down into my collar. I’d hung all the washing on the line bef...

My childhood bedroom overlooked a village green, and I have been fond of those open spaces ever since. My brother and I used to hang out there with our friends. It was our amphitheatre, the scene of day- long rugby matches, and a cricket pitch with the twin hazards of hor- rific bounce after cows had been herded across the wicket, and the risk of a lost ball if an exuberant shot sent it flying int...

‘At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t... The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the...

I was back on the marshes where I’d begun my journey almost half a year ago. I liked it out here. A town lay in the distance, its prominent wind turbines turning steadily. I preferred these empty corners of my map, the ignored and forgotten places. I was drawn to their anonymity and the distance they put between me and all the things I ‘should’ be doing in life, the sort of things I imagined every...

Much of today’s square was taken up by stuff that loosely lumps together under the heading of ‘infrastructure’. Railways, roads, round- abouts and railings. Big metal things. Corrugated sheds. Padlocks. Pylons. Pick-ups with orange hazard lights. Men in hard hats. Things I don’t understand but that I know are important. All the ‘Keep Out’ signs on this grid square were definitely for the best.  I...

‘Get out of the bloody field!’  ‘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...

I passed a primary school in a forgotten-looking estate of identikit tower blocks as I cycled into today’s grid square. The playground was full of joyous shrieks and laughter, and three colourful quotes were dis- played on the wall:  • ‘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...

Out into the delirium of spring, riding fast and light-heart- ed towards today’s grid square. Birds belting out love songs in every hedgerow. The first blush of sunshine in the oilseed rape fields, pret- ty but terrible for leaching nitrates into waterways. The first sulphur- ous brimstone butterfly, a yellow that put the ‘butter’ into butterfly. In Every Day Nature, Andy Beer suggests you note th...

Blackthorn blossom decorated every lane this week. It was late March and the best time to spot the difference between hawthorn and blackthorn. Blackthorn trees blossom before their leaves appear, while hawthorn does it the other way round. We use many cues to connect what we see with the seasons (fairy lights at Christmas, for example), and making a conscious effort to be observant each week was b...

I locked my bike by the pond on the village green. It was a quiet morning and nobody was about. Village greens conjure peaceful imag- es of cricket matches, community celebrations and maypole dances. But historically, village greens were about more than recreation. Since the Middle Ages they have been an area of common grassland for the use of everyone, often with a pond where fish were reared, ca...

‘March, month of “many weathers”,’ grumbled John Clare, the peas- ant poet, and I thought of him as I sheltered from a shower beneath a church’s lychgate. Lych is derived from the Old English word lich , meaning corpse, and the lychgate was where a group bringing a body for burial would meet the priest. These were the mad March days of rain then sun then wind then rain then breakfast. I spent all...

I was drawn by the distinct scent of fresh water. It’s such a fine, uplifting odour. ‘Long enough in the desert a man, like other animals, can learn to smell water,’ wrote the late Edward Abbey, American author and environmental activist, in Desert Solitaire . Far from a desert, across the railway tracks behind an industrial park, I found a misty, moody, monochrome fishing lake lined with rushes. ...

This was a landmark day of the year: my first bike ride without wearing gloves. I woke to a softer, earlier, warmer sunrise and cycled out to a grid square that began on an overgrown heath of bracken, gorse and heather. It needed an auroch or two to control it. I continued into a wood whose highest branches swayed in the stiff breeze. I lay on my back and watched the twigs rattling against each ot...

Historical names for February include the unappealing Old English terms Solmonath (mud month) and Kale-monath (cabbage month). I’m pretty sure the Hawaiian word for February, Pepeluali , refers to neither mud nor cabbage.  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...

There are two types of people in the world, those who love snow and those who do not. There is no such thing as a child who does not like snow. A few people have valid objections to snow: those with bro- ken hips, and confounded commuters, for example. But anyone else whose heart does not leap at the first falling snowflakes is a miserable curmudgeon. There, I’ve said it! I get as excited by snow...

Right, Humphreys. Stop procrastinating. You haven’t even started yet!’ I rebuked myself, and stepped out into the rain to begin. As always, solvitur ambulando , I solve things by walking.  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...

The Right to Roam, Enclosures Acts, and the issues of accessing the countryside. Rain was still falling hard a week later when I cycled past a garden with two life-size sculptures of giraffes, towards a modern red-brick Catholic church. On the church wall was a statue of a bored-looking Saint George stabbing down at the dragon with about as much enthu- siasm as a community service litter picker. O...

I hid my bike in a hedge and set out to explore the grid square on foot, keen to see what the world would offer to my imagination today. My voice sounded small as I hummed a song to myself beneath an outsize bridge rumbling with overhead lorries. The solitude I experi- ence in nature is very different from the loneliness that often keeps me company in daily life on this map. It is one of the appea...

Busy days and rain falling. Chasing my tail and going nowhere. Horizons closing in. Boring routines and putting away the weekly shop. So, when I got an opportunity to escape, I bolted for the woods that the random-number-generator ordered me towards. I bustled around grabbing my camera, rain gear and Thermos flask. I sloshed a can of tomato soup into a pan, added a tin of chickpeas, a handful of f...

The darkest hour may be just before the dawn, but the darkest morning comes well after midwinter, when the jollity of Christmas has long since faded away. The latest sunrise is almost three weeks after the December solstice. It might be a fresh calendar year and a new start, but as I cycled out today it was one of the bleakest weeks of the year, with barely eight hours of daylight on my map.  The...

Litter was strewn over today’s grid square like wrapping paper on Christmas morning. I didn’t want to be disheartened by it on every out- ing, but nor did I want to not see these problems or accept them as nor- mal and just shrug my shoulders. I live far from the cascades of contour lines, miles of moorland or rushing rivers I relish. Could I really scratch my adventurous itch on this tame map, be...

December is a quiet month. I looked out over a rolling landscape of empty fields divided into squares by long, straight hedges. The only sounds were of distant cars. When did it become normal to hear more traffic than wildlife? Everything felt subdued. But I was glad to be beginning this project at the tail end of a year so that I could experience everything perking up in the brighter days to come...

One motivation for exploring a square each week, come rain or shine, was to make being out in nature part of my routine. I hoped that becoming connected with where I live, with its weather and seasons, would keep me attuned to the seedlings pushing through pavements, the migrating birds passing overhead, the provenance of the food I eat, and reveal some interesting new running routes too.  Taking...