As we know, walking is stupid. It is dirty, difficult, tiring and fraught with many dangers. You could have a heart attack, you could be struck by lightning, you could be run over or, and this happens a lot, you could be attacked by a cow.

Look at it this way. No motorist has ever had to be rescued by a helicopter, but from now till the spring we will be bombarded with an endless stream of news stories about walkists who’ve had to be snatched from the jaws of death by the RAF after they fell over or got lost in a cloud.

I understand, of course, that we need the ability to walk, so that we can get to the fridge. But the idea of “going for a walk” seems completely ridiculous. Because one of two things will happen. You will either end up back at home again — and what’s the point of going out in the first place if that’s your goal? — or you will be killed.

Some pooh-pooh this, saying that when you are walking in the British countryside you will see all sorts of animals and plants that you would not see if you simply stayed at home playing Call of Duty 4 on the PlayStation.

Really? The last time I looked, Britain was not even remotely like Botswana. There are no brown hyenas, for instance, in Welwyn Garden City. Nor are there lions in Scotland. As we know from Kate Humble’s charming Autumnwatch series on the BBC, you need to be extremely patient if you want to see anything at all. And even if you are extremely patient, all you’ll ever see is a field mouse. Or maybe a barnacle goose. These are dull. Indeed, the total number of interesting animals in Britain is none.

However, if you are in a car, things are very different. Last weekend, I woke on Sunday morning with a catastrophic hangover, which my wife said would be cured with some fresh air. I tried explaining that the air in the sitting room near the PlayStation machine was just as fresh as the air in the garden but she was having none of it.

So children were roused, horses were tacked and arrangements were made to meet with the friends we’d been drinking with the night before ... for a morning in the countryside.

Some were in the saddle, some were on foot and a girlfriend and I were in a Range Rover, trying not to be sick. “This is walking, isn’t it?” she said, as we bumped over the field and down a precipitous slope into a wood.

She was wrong. It was better than walking. The noise of the diesel V8 was startling all sorts of animals that would have remained hidden and unseen to the tiptoeing rambler. Deer shot out of every bush, badgers scampered out of their holes and, with eyes blinking, rushed off to alert their mates. Hares leapt, rabbits snouted and foxes looked on slyly, wondering if there was perhaps a baby in the back of the car they could eat.

This is the thing about wildlife. As beaters know, a pheasant will simply sit still when a man walks by. But if the man starts making a noise, it will take off. The same goes for everything. Present an animal with a bearded biped in a cagoule and it will remain in situ, holding its breath until the fool has gone away. Present it with a twin-turbocharged Range Rover and it’ll leap out of its burrow, or nest, or set, to reveal itself in what passes in Britain for full glory.

A blast of the horn roused, even managed to scare, a family of barn owls, and normally you’d need a night-vision lens, a night without sleep and several months in hospital recovering from hypothermia to see one of those. I love barn owls, and seeing a whole herd of them, during the day, from the leather-lined, air-conditioned comfort of a Range Rover was sensational.

Later, we met up with the riders, who looked terrified and drained, and the walkers, who were covered in mud. Neither group had seen a single thing of any interest. And, what’s more, their hangovers were still just as bad as ours.

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