Open Writing

While eating breakfast this month I half-expected to see a stranded ark outside the dining-room window.

This has been the wettest August in England ever recorded at the BBC weather centre. There’s been rain, rain, and more rain - two-thirds more than normal.

And we live on high ground. The very place an ark might come to rest after floating upwards from the flooded valley bottoms.

For most of my life I’ve been a man of the hills. I’ve lived on hills in Northumberland, Indiana, Kenya… And now I’m back at the 600 ft mark on the Yorkshire Pennine ridge where I have spent most of my life.

I love to be where the air is rarer, walking on the hilltops, looking out from my home on a long view.

This isn’t a Lord Snooty attitude. A desire to live in a high place where I can look down on the common herd. For me hill dwelling and hill walking bring a sense of freedom, of being closer to the natural world.

In Northumberland I worked in an office in the centre of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A big, bustling city, Newcastle. A regional capital. In my opinion, one of the three best cities in England.

After a working day spent at the very centre of the Geordie kingdom I would drive eight miles west, to Heddon-on-the-Wall, there to sit in my very own semi-detached palace, savouring a five-mile view of the beautiful Tyne valley.

In Kenya our dwelling was at an altitude that might have made some folk feel a little wheezy and dizzy. Our home in a northern suburb of Nairobi was 5,600 ft above sea level.

One weekend I was in a party of four which set out to walk to the top of one of Mt Kenya’s peaks. We camped out at 14,500 ft. Two of the group awoke with splitting headaches, too ill to go on. They were suffering from altitude sickness.

Another young chap and myself plodded up to the 16,500 ft summit of Lenana with not so much as a hint of a headache between us. He lived in Ethiopia at an altitude of more than 8,000 ft. Me in Nairobi, in a house that was more than a mile higher than sea level. The two of us were undergoing altitude training by going about our daily business.

Here on the edge of the Pennine village where I have lived for the past 32 years I look out on a country estate that was established around 1280. There are trees galore, cows and horses grazing amiably, and, right now, a small combined harvester gathering in what can be salvaged of a soggy crop.

When I hike to the top of the ridge which is the high point of the estate there’s a 360 degree panorama of hundreds of square miles of Yorkshire.

I live in a heavily populated area. But up there, with the wind in your hair, on the summit of Whitley Beaumont estate, tarmac, bricks and concrete - the works of man - are lost in a vast rolling green panorama of the natural world.

I’ve stood on that ridge thousands of times, relishing the scene. And every time I realised how lucky I am to be living in these here hills.

Now, would you believe, the rain has stopped and the sun is shining. And I’m going for a walk. Not upwards this time, but downwards.

My wife Joyce has gone grocery shopping. And I’ve arranged to walk down and join her for a coffee.

When I reach the valley bottom, if I hear hammer and chisel at work, then see jutting around the corner of a house something that looks like the prow of a large wooden vessel, I’ll worry for a moment.

Then, human nature being what it is, I’ll grin, knowing that many a millennia will pass before the flood waters reach my front door.