When I went to New Zealand a few years ago, I was overwhelmed by the natural beauty of the landscape.

Nice one, God, I thought.

But after two or three weeks, I tired of it. It had no depth. This virgin countryside was pretty, but it really wasn’t very interesting at all.

There is nowhere, not one tiny neglected corner in England that is untouched by man, and it’s all very, very interesting. You can peel it back like the skin of an onion and there’s another layer below, and one below that.

You can be walking anywhere in this country and all around you will be the legacy of thousands of years of man’s influence. You can be trekking on the high, lonely fells of Cumbria, immersed in an impenetrable ancient woodland, walking on the coastal cliffs of North Cornwall or battling through a congested, fume-choked city centre and you will be enclosed by a landscape that has been made by man.

And you should be walking.

You can see so much more, no matter where you are.

Take your time; look around.

Sadly, walking seems to have become unappealing, underrated and unfashionable. We need to get to places fast to live our busy lives. But there’s this disconnect; you lose contact with everything around you. You might gaze out of a train or car window and think you see things, but you don’t. You’re not part of it. Suffer a puncture on a motorway and you’ll soon realise that the hard shoulder exists in a completely parallel world to the carriageway. And you never knew until you slipped from the one to the other.

Next time you’re walking in the countryside, stop and look around you now and again.

Look at the hedge boundaries and the field patterns. Why are they like that? Where does that track go? Why is that footpath there? Perhaps it was the route between a farmhouse and the church. Or an itinerant’s path to a long worked-out quarry or mine. It might once have been a coaching stage and before that a drover’s road.

Originally a prehistoric ridgeway.

That pile of stones in the corner of a field. Was that a worker’s cottage? And that ancient tree on the parish boundary; does it have a name? Did they hang miscreants from it?

Look around you, wherever you are.

Learn something about this legacy and you will look with new eyes.