The best way to understand a lovely landscape is to ride through it on the back of a lovely horse, preferably in the company of a lovely girl. The lovely horse was a chestnut three-part-thoroughbred called Prince, the lovely girl was my niece Connie and the lovely landscape was on the precipitous sides of the Severn Valley.

I love the difference between their side of the country and mine. Away from the chill and the dry of the far East, out in the wild West you find the balmy and the damp. The damp was rolling generously down from the skies, but Connie and I and the horses were beneath trees, with me savouring the unfamiliar landscape with every hoof-fall.

The ground beneath the trees was a mass of constellations and galaxies. These white stars, wood anemones, are faithful indicators that the stuff we were riding through was ancient forest. It is not a plant that gets about much. Its seed is rarely fertile, and even then not for long. It prefers to spread through its roots, but does so with glorious slowness. The front will advance at a speed of six feet in a hundred years, according to Flora Britannica. So when you ride through an extensive starscape like this, there is no denying the ancientness. You can feel your own roots.

We don't do moss properly out in the East. We don't have the stones, we don't have the moisture. But this wood was bristling with the stuff. A tumbled down stone wall of incomprehensible antiquity was furry with the moss of centuries.

Rum stuff, moss. You don't feel your roots by means of moss: moss doesn't bother with them. Instead, they are equipped to extract moisture from shallow surfaces. They don't need soil, and are often better off without it. They can shut off in dry times, and leap back into life when the moisture returns. Botanists collect moss, store in a paper envelope and bring it back to life at will. There are mosses that are endangered in this country, so my friends at Plantlife tell me, but not the kind you find riding through wet woods. This stuff, feathery or horse-taily, is thriving wherever humans have been smart enough to let well alone.

Sound is part of a landscape. The subtle differences between my home and here can be perceived with your eyes closed. The babble of thrushes and tits was much familiar enough, but it was intermittently pierced by the sound of a referee's whistle. That's nuthatch. These are not West Country specialists but they love mature trees and there aren't enough round my place. Here, they are a constant presence: a repertoire of shrill whistles that carries an astonishing distances. And from the sky, every now and then a wild mewling. That really is West Country.

Buzzard, of course: they great shaggy glide-happy bird of prey that haunts the skies of the west. They are spreading out from this stronghold after years of pesticide and persecution: but they are doing so in their own good time, a little bit faster than wood anemones.

Back in the Sixties buzzards were astonishing things to see. I remember a Cornish holiday lit up by the distant sight of a pair of them: a miracle. They are now a daily sight in the West, but still not without their miraculous side, especially for a visitor from the East. Connie and I returned our mighty steeds to their fields. Lunch: and with it, a pint of Guinness. Another speciality of the West that has spread east.

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