We woke early on Saturday morning to clear skies and a hard frost, the view across the Mournes showed a low band of snow across the range. We packed a picnic, piled spare clothes into the rucksack and headed south.

The reason for the trip was to take our friend Rod to climb his first mountain. A Belfast city dweller, Rod was inspired to climb Slieve Binnian after watching the TV programme ‘Off the Beaten Track’. He wanted to stand on the spot where Daryl Grimison, the programmes presenter had stood.

We parked at Carrick Little Car park near to the village of Annalong and headed uphill, firstly on the Carrick Little track, then tracking left on to the lower slopes of the mountain following the line of the Mourne Wall.  The fresh snow was powdery and up to a foot deep with thinker drifts in places.

Binnian is one of those deceptive mountains; you think you are nearly at the top when another rise appears on the skyline - Rod was deceived several times. After an hour or so and a few snowball fights, we all reached the summit at 747m, a characteristic rugged crest of rocky torrs.  Breathtaking views stretched out around us - inland across the snow covered summits of the Mournes – Bernagh, Commedagh and Donard, below to the Silent Valley and Ben Crom Reservoirs and out to the horizon beyond the Irish Sea with the Isle of Man clearly visible.

To Rod, a city dweller all his life, this was a new world.  He was amazed that places like this are so accessible to Belfast and equally amazed that he and so many others he knows, had never done something like this before.  For us it was rewarding to share the experience with a newcomer to the hills and later over lunch we made plans for our next summit with our new convert.  The day I am sure, is something that Rod will talk about for a long time to come, the magic of the mountains, the freshness of the air and the inspiration of the sights.

The next morning, I pulled open the curtains at 7am to reveal a further and heavier snowfall.  Having never snow boarded before, I asked the question ‘Is there enough snow?’  ‘Lets give int a go!’ was the answer.  We quickly packed board and boots into the car and made our way slowly to Delamont Country Park on the shores of Strangford Lough. We seemed to be the only people around as we headed into the Park and up the hill to the Strangford Stone.  Standing over 10 meters high, it is the tallest megalith in the British Isles.  The granite stone faces its "birthplace" in the Mourne Mountains, clearly visible on the southern horizon.

After a little instruction and advice, I pulled on the snow boots and clipped into the board.  I slowly and tentatively slid down the hill towards the Lough, turning too sharp at the bottom and falling in a heap. I loved it!  An hour later I felt like I was getting the hang of it, but as the mid morning sun began to melt some of the snow, it was time to go home.

A great big white weekend!

Crossing a spectacular new wooden footbridge in the Naden Valley above Rochdale the other day set me ruminating about this most fundamental part of the public rights of way jigsaw. Ordnance Survey Explorer maps are liberally dotted with the legend “FB”; short shrift is usually given to such unless the said structure proves to be absent, when the air turns blue and fish cover their ears….

They’re the unsung masterpieces of the countryside; engineering marvels covering the whole span of human history. In the most ancient of times our distant forbearers sought to master nature’s watery snakes. Whilst the wooded causeways of the great moss and bog-lands have left but-tantalising scraps, stone-constructed passages continue in-use today; probably the longest-serving human-built constructions. These are the memorable clapper-bridges, a handful of which are still to be found (mostly) in the uplands, linking the sinews of highland paths that recall the genesis of settlements thousands of years ago – at Postbridge on Dartmoor, Tarr Steps on Exmoor or the simple slabs at Arthog (Snowdonia), Great Rundale (Dufton, Cumbria) or Wycoller (Lancashire). Some of these are medieval reconstructions of ancient crossings, renewed to allow pack-horses to cross.

Fast-forward to these medieval days of yore and the relict transport links suddenly explode in number. Like clapper bridges, pack-bridges vary in size; most are the hugely picturesque humps with low walls that span a thousand streams and becks the length and breadth of the land, such as remote Smardale in the North Pennines or at Close Gate near Marsden (West Yorkshire). Others have multiple arches like the delicate Cromwell’s Bridge at Great Mitton (Lancashire) or those at Hockenhull Platts outside Chester, whilst a few are amongst medieval England’s greatest structures, like the remarkable Essex Bridge across the Trent near Great Haywood (Staffs), where just 14 of 40 arches remain above the marshy land. Others again have been developed into road bridges, no longer the preserve of non-motorised users – the lengthy Swarkestone Causeway in Derbyshire for example.

Most footbridges, of course, result from economic necessity/ambition, built to ease access and most originate from the times of the late agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, say 1700-1900, when the need for a flexible, locally-mobile workforce demanded improved communications. Most are unremarkable, unfussy structures but some stick in the mind – my favourites include the miniature suspension bridges such as Wynch Bridge at Low Force, Teesdale, an experiment with cast iron dating from 1830, perhaps the oldest iron footbridge (Ironbridge apart) still in use today, and at Hebden, in the Yorkshire Dales, built in 1885 essentially as an advertisement by the local blacksmith William Bell. The Wye’s impressive iron foot-spans near Sellack shout of the Victorians’ confidence and perceived superiority over nature, as does the Gunners Pool Bridge, alarmingly high above Castle Eden Dene in County Durham.

Then there are the distinctly curious footbridges, such as the fishermen’s bridge at Carrick-a-Rede (Antrim); the wire-mesh bridge over the Wye at The Biblins (Gloucestershire), built by the Forestry Commission in the 1930’s; the medieval Trinity Bridge at Crowland (Lincolnshire), a triangular-arched oddity and, bang up to date, the suspended Millennium Walkway bridge strung above the torrents of the River Goyt at The Torrs Gorge in Derbyshire. Canals, too, are always a happy hunting ground for the more unusual dry-crossings, with castellated bridges in the West Midlands and split-bridges on the Stratford-on-Avon Canal; a few evocative latticework bridges still remain, mostly on preserved railways.

So next time you’re out and about in the countryside, spare a moment to consider these most workaday elements of your walk; seemingly everywhere thanks to the tireless work of countryside staff, landowners, farmers, volunteers and societies who provide and maintain these often simple and unassuming - but occasionally memorable - crossings to enable us to enjoy Britain’s public rights of way.

With sunshine and longer days, with snowdrops and the first buds of new growth, there are cheering signs that Spring is finally on the way. But on a walk last week I spotted one animal at least that isn't ready yet to wave goodbye to the winter. On a late-lingering snow-field, I was thrilled to chance upon half-a-dozen Mountain Hares.

The first one I saw was standing upright on his back legs, close to the path. His long ears shot up in mock surprise and he cocked his head at a quizzical angle as though to say: "What on earth are you doing here?" After a few seconds he dropped back onto his front feet and bounded across the snow with an incredible turn of speed. And as I watched him sprint away I suddenly realised that the whole slope in front of me was covered in a chaotic flurry of hares running in all directions. If only I could move that swiftly and easily uphill through the snow!

All too soon their white coats disappeared into the featurelessness of the surrounding landscape, and I carried on with my slow plod towards the summit, amazed that any animal could be so well suited to life in such a cold and hostile place. The trick, it turns out, is big feet and brilliantly-evolved natural camouflage. The Mountain Hare has broad pads that act like snowshoes; and a coat that changes from brown in the summer to white in the winter in order to blend with the snow-covered hillsides.

Unexpected discoveries and sightings really are one of the great joys of walking. I later found out that I'd unwittingly headed into one of the best areas in Britain to see these hares: the grouse moors of the Cairngorm hills, where they can dig down even through the snow for shrubs and heather to eat. Yet for all that it was a wonderful surprise, my chance encounter also served as a warning: even as we head into March, winter hasn't entirely sounded the retreat. These well-adapted mountain dwellers clearly haven't seen fit to dump their white camouflage yet in favour of their warm-weather attire. And while 're still wearing their winter coats, I think I'll keep mine on too!

Light-hearted pub quizzes sometimes include that hoary old favourite “Where is the most dangerous place in England to live?” The answer, invariably, is Midsomer, where the number of murders appears to outnumber the local population. A quiet corner of the “footballer belt” in North Cheshire may be the ancient equivalent. In the 1980’s body parts turned up with some regularity at the edge of Wilmslow; the local DCI Barnaby investigated and a conviction was secured. The self-confessed killer was, however, hoist by his own petard, for the remains were not of his missing wife but of another era entirely.

Ginger-haired Pete Marsh met a violent death. Beaten, stabbed, garrotted and drowned, his body was consigned to the tilth whilst the Romans were invading southern England. The ground, a marshy, peaty expanse, offered not only a handy burial place for a ritually killed corpse but also a secure place to live, protected by the bogs, woods and brooks of this nether-world that is Lindow Moss. Those who died a natural death were also given to the ground; the 1980’s simply saw a peak in the reporting of parts of bodies that naturally decomposed over millennia, only to be exhumed in peat being dug for garden improvement. Pete Marsh, or Lindow Man as he’s better known, now spends a peripatetic lifestyle moving between museums.

Whilst peat extraction over the centuries has whittled away at the Moss, this eerie expanse remains a haunting place. Low, wooded sandbars rise slightly above the levels, a filigree of tree-lined paths betwixt watery rhines picked emerald-green by sphagnum moss. Stub your toe on a wooded encumbrance and it’s likely to be a 4000 year old lump of pickled, preserved tree-trunk, remnant of a Bronze Age Scots Pine forest. It’s a tumbled, unkempt landscape, pockmarked by abandoned diggings and scored by twisted, whitened boughs clawing for the sky through the strange, desiccated, almost other-worldly flatts. Sparse, thin woodland of alders and silver birch gives home to myriad warblers, tits and finches; dragon and damsel flies flit through rushes; hot summer days herald a strange soundtrack of creaks, cracks and gloops as the mire dries out. On a raw, misty February day it’s a timeless place, a continuum from the dawn of history; one of the very few landscapes Pete Marsh would still recognise in today’s overburdened, sanitised countryside.

My late-departed mother grew up around here and played amidst this landscape from the mists of time; maybe it’s her spirit that draws me here time-and-again. Landscape as ancestral memory.

It’s amazing what you can do with the right motivation. As the deluded donkey will plod forever forwards to try to reach that dangled carrot, we all have something (albeit usually more enticing than a raw vegetable) that will spur us on, even when we feel our boots will tread no further. 

Take an instance on the Cornwall Coast Path. It was hot. I was tired. My back was weighed down with too many kilos of tent, socks and cereal bars (which I was bored to tears of eating by now anyway); my legs were wearied by ten days of going up cliffs and down cliffs, only to find another cliff (and another…) beckoning with its up-downs to seeming infinity. The Other Half and I were nearing the Lizard, perhaps one of the most splendid sections of the entire trail, especially on a day like this – one of blue skies, Mediterranean waters and seals frolicking in the shallows. But I was still cream-crackered, and would gladly have flung my pack down right there and then, and curled up on the grass for a restorative nap. But then I heard my carrot: Ann’s Famous Pasty Shop.

According to the guidebook from which the Other Half was reading, this tiny bakery in Lizard village served up the best crimped pastry parcels in the land – nay, THE WORLD. Only trouble was, Ann closed at 2pm. And it was now a quarter past one, with some way to go…

Though every muscle, every sinew of my being (which had been up and tramping since 7.30 that morning) wanted to find a bed of heather to collapse in, and though my bag seemed intent on driving my shoulders into the path rather than along it, the draw of Ann and her lauded wares hastened us on, with a speed hitherto unimagined – we were running on pasty power.

We huffed across fields, raced red-faced up rises, and, finally, clomped along the pavements of lovely Lizard, to arrive at an inauspicious-looking garage-turned-snack-shop at 1.57pm – only to be told by a smiling baker that, “oh no love, we won’t close until three!” 

No matter. We were here. With two of Ann’s finest safely in our possession, we found our campsite and finally collapsed in the manner I’d been dreaming of for the preceding few hours. Sprawled in front of a scatter of tent parts I had neither the energy nor inclination to erect, I slowly opened the fat paper bag next to me and grinned: my golden, bulging, still warm-to-the-touch carrot. Poor old donkey.

It was a cold and blustery day as we put on our coats, scarves and hats and headed along the path on the sea defenses at the northern end of Strangford Lough. We watched the heavy grey clouds moving closer in our direction with Scrabo Tower framed in the foreground, hoping that we had enough time to complete our walk before the next shower. With little shelter along the route, we walked quickly with our collars pulled up, huddling closer together to block the wind.

Unlike walkers whose numbers substantially decrease over the cold winter months, the numbers of birds on the shores of the Lough increase substantially. Thousands of migratory birds visit Strangford Lough each year and feed on the soft muds and muddy sands that form vast areas particularly at the Lough’s northern end.

The most numerous species is the light bellied Brent Goose. A small, dark goose about the same size as a mallard, characterized by a black head and cronking call, which carries across the Lough on the winds and becoming synonymous with the pale winter light.

The Brent lay their eggs in Arctic Canada in mid-June and then prepare for the 3000 kilometre journey ahead, eating to build up their weight. The first birds descend on the Lough in August and by late September most of the estimated 40,000 will have arrived. By December the eelgrass supplies becomes depleted, while some geese stay on the Lough, others move to feeding grounds further south in Ireland.

While the Brent Geese where not so abundant on this particular winters day as at their height in October, we watched hundreds of other birds, seeming not to notice the bracing wind and threat of icy rain. Flocks of curlews and oystercatchers waded in the edge of the tide, while redshanks lifted and settled and appeared to almost run along the shore.

With the first spots of rain beginning to fall we turned and headed for home, saying goodbye to the Lough and good luck to the last of the geese that would soon be leaving to head back across the Atlantic on another epic journey.

For what it's worth, I reckon the world of Modern Art could learn a lot from the work of Stone Age Man. OK, so I'm not much of a culture-vulture, but during a recent walk, I encountered the most puzzling and thought-provoking piece of art I've ever seen.

It was a bewitching pattern of concentric circles, rings and scattered dots - an abstract composition, yet full of energy and purpose. Surely this must mean something, I asked myself. But what? Most intriguing of all: the artwork in question was not on display in some contemporary London gallery. Instead, it was slap-bang in the middle of a remote forest on the west coast of Scotland.

And far from being the latest offering by one of our celebrated Young British Artists, this was actually the work of our prehistoric ancestors. Although they were carved into the stone some 5,000 years ago, I'd say these cryptic markings remain as captivating and mysterious as anything the art-world has produced ever since.

I'd heard about the rock-carvings at Ormaig while researching the history of Argyll, and decided to set out, with my partner Jennie as photographer, from the village of Kilmartin to find them. After a few miles, we were deep into a thick forestry plantation when we stumbled onto the faint path that leads to the fabulous natural gallery where the rocks are on show (It's at grid ref NM823027, if you want to find them for yourself).

In a clearing, there they were: just as they were left by their original sculptor all those centuries ago. The sheer unimaginable age of these carvings is awe-inspiring; as is the unknowable mystery of their creation. According to archaeologists, these types of cup-and-ring markings are scattered across Scotland, northern England and along the Atlantic coast of Europe. 

Experts reckon they were carved in roughly 3,000BC - around the time when the hunter-gatherer inhabitants of Scotland were starting to abandon their nomadic lifestyle in favour of more settled farming communities. But why? What could have possessed a Neolithic farmer armed only with the most primitive of tools, to spend hours, days, weeks, chipping away at the hard stone?

No-one knows for sure. Maybe they were intended as signposts or markers for a territorial boundary. Or maybe they were designed for some ritual or religious purpose. Perhaps, though, they are simply the early product of mankind's expressive impulse or creative urge: art, in other words.

Personally, I applaud Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin: seen in the right context, their diamond-encrusted skulls and unmade beds are interesting ruminations on society, on humanity, on the state of contemporary culture. But when it comes to enduring appeal and a mystique that reaches out across the ages, surely they can't even hope to compete with the anonymous Stone Age artists of Ormaig? 

Only time will tell...

Finding the obscure forestry car park, secreted amidst a web of sinuous byroads in the folds of The Doward hills, is a challenge too far for many, which leaves this secluded part of the Welsh Marches refreshingly quiet. A December day finds me on crisp, frost-frazzled path, meandering past old limekilns and little quarries to the gaping maw of King Arthur’s Cave, a multi-chambered Pandora’s Box of artefacts, revealing that our Palaeolithic forefathers shared this bijou residence with cave bears, sabre-toothed tigers and hyenas – not at the same time, presumably – and feasted on giant elk.

Leap forward several millennia and that scourge of the Romans, Caractacus, is rumoured to have made a home within the ramparted summit acres of the nearby Great Doward. The hill fort’s necklace of ditches and banks are riddled with badger setts; a great place to spend a late summer evening, but on this winter’s day fallow deer are the mammal of the moment. My rather clod-footed progress across crunchy, leaf-litter strewn paths disturbs a small, browsing herd of such. We lock eyes momentarily, then they’re off, their athletic leaps and bounds over frozen earth and tumbled rocks a minor miracle of grace, bravery and bravado as they flee down precipitous slopes towards the river, invisible in it’s arboreal chasm.

Silvery, skeletal forms of beech, birch and ash shimmer in the watery sunlight, and ivy and moss glimmer vivid shades of green as my thin path rises up the flank of a limestone bluff, trailing then to an easily missed fork, leading to one of England’s great unsung viewpoints. Breaking free of a veneer of firs and yews, the ground disappears from beneath my toecaps, plummeting several hundred feet into the Wye’s sublime gorge. This is the top of one of the Seven Sisters, immense spires of Dolomitic Limestone thrusting to the sky from the depths of the rift; a spectacular, dream-like landscape of hanging woods, yew groves, rock-needles and cliffs cleaved by the Wye through the Forest of Dean’s thickly wooded plateau. The famous Symond’s Yat Rock is a mile to the north, but these secluded sentinels see few visitors, leaving this mouth-watering panorama along the wooded defile as a wintery gift to hardier souls.

Excitable jackdaws carouse along the line of pillars; a couple of buzzard float easily by, chattering fieldfares feast on holly berries whilst suicidal grey squirrels scamper through branches protruding well out over the abyss. Far below, the mercurial waters of the Wye twist beneath the delicate span of the Biblins footbridge, but this is for another day. Forest tracks return me to my lift for a short drive back to reality and a welcome wallop of real ale in the warm and friendly little Wye Knot Inn, at the head of the gorge opposite Yat Rock.