WELCOME
IF THERE’S ONE thing British children leave school knowing it’s that they’re inhabitants of a pretty tiny nation. We don’t have the biggest mountain, the deepest lake, the tallest cliff or indeed anything to deliver victory in a game of international Top Trumps. But that sense of inferiority can’t withstand exposure to our countryside. Out here there’s no measuring magnificence in feet or metres, no weighing the value of our wild places in crude tonnage. It’s said that you can’t measure the length of our coastline because it has a fractal dimension – it just keeps getting longer the closer you look at it. I think the same magic property applies to our whole countryside. So forget measuring it; get ready instead to set sail on a high sea of adventure – and make the places in this guide your first ports of call.