MY FAVOURITE VIEW

The staggering views to and from Hay Bluff straddling England and Wales are something that Monty Don simply couldnõt live without

Monty Don loves Hays Bluff

The wild vast view of the Black Mountains is especially enthralling in winter

I love mountains of any kind, but the stark, linear image of the hills of the Black Mountains in winter is especially beautiful to me.

At the western end of the mountains is Hay Bluff, a cliff that rises almost sheer and which you can see from miles away – I can actually see it from the attic room of my house in Herefordshire and this view from afar has been a part of my daily life on and off for 32 years. From Hay Bluff itself and, in particular, Gospel Pass, the highest road point in Wales, you have the most staggering, extraordinary view out west towards Wales. This part of the country is very wild and unoccupied, with the steep wooded valleys on the plain and River Wye glistening down below, and the hills of Wales rising up in front of you. It’s one of the great views, I think, of the British Isles.

What I find so inspiring about this area is the sense of wild space it brings. One of the things that’s so striking about America is this sense of space and enormity, which is not something we really have here. There’s lots of domestic landscape, which I love, but you go from Herefordshire which, by and large, is an agricultural, bucolic landscape and you suddenly rise up and you’re in the middle of mountains and great vast, untamed country, and that’s very exciting. Gardens are man-made and domestic. You can try and capture wilderness, but you cannot capture that sense of scale, that landscape, in a garden and nor would I want to.

The British countryside is everything. Firstly, it is our history, it is as monumental to human life as any great building. Our history is laid out in the countryside and should be preserved in exactly the same way as we would treasure and preserve a cathedral. Secondly, it’s a working landscape; it’s largely agricultural, and has been for a great deal of history, so it’s part of the daily life of thousands of people who earn their living off the landscape. And finally, it’s just beautiful and beauty should always be looked after. The British countryside is uniquely beautiful, there’s nowhere else like it in the world, we may take it for granted because it’s ours, but it’s precious and if it goes it won’t come back.

by Monty Don and Derry Moore (£35, Prestel Publishing) is available now.