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We are shaped by our landscapes. They might be green or grey, wide-open or built-up, they might be here or there or anywhere, we might not have chosen them, we might not love them, we might not even like them, but they shape us, no less than we have shaped them.

A short story written in 2022 for BBC Radio 4.

It’s easy to conflate the content of the northern novel with some sort of communal voice of the north. But the novelists’ north is not the same as the north that people actually live in.

The subtitle here is something of a misnomer: as with Attenborough’s previous volume, Adventures Of A Young Naturalist, the emphasis in these travel journals from the 1950s and 60s is as much on varieties of human culture as on non-human natural history.

This is one of the first nature books of the Covid-19 pandemic and it will be surprising if it does not turn out to be one of the best.

A story first published in The Lonely Crowd.