A bright day, blue with some clouds and a chilly north-western wind. There is the sweet aroma of new growth and the land looks green, at long last. In the valley bottom, where it is sheltered, it becomes almost warm. A pair of buzzards mew as they encircle the hillside. The first skylark of the year hovers perhaps a hundred feet overhead.

From Shill Moor you can look east and see the sea. The hills to the north, with their long, rounded backs, rising and dipping, resemble a school of dolphins frozen in an ocean of heather and grass. The wind whips across the tops. Descending from Shill Moor proves surprisingly easy, by walking down the western slope into the narrow valley of the Hope Sike, along which the Salter’s Road runs.

High Bleakhope lies beside the upper Breamish in a flat-bottomed valley with steep sides. Beyond the farmhouse is a small coniferous plantation with its own micro-climate, affording shelter from the wind and a soft bed of needles on which to sit and have lunch. Pied wagtails, with black cap and breast and white belly, flit across the stream, calling ‘chissik, chissik’.

This is a charming valley, small in scale and perfectly formed. The River Breamish is just four feet across above Nagshead Knowe. Here are two oystercatchers. Above Snuffies Scar, the heather is being razed and generates surprisingly fierce flames, fanned by the wind that blows the dense smoke eastwards.