Revealed: the author's 12 wildest places in the British Isles - do you agree?

On a bright cold winter morning at the start of 2006, I set out before sunrise in search of the wild.

In front of me was a challenge: to travel the British Isles, looking for wild places wherever I might find them. Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places was the book I was aiming to write.

I had set myself a nice round number: 500. Were there that many wild places left in these overcrowded, overbuilt islands of ours? I didn't know.

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One question, however, loomed large. What was wild? Would I have to travel to the rugged, unpopulated landscapes of the outermost north of Scotland, or the Atlantic outposts of the west of Ireland, to find truly wild places?

Setting out on my journey, I would have said yes, absolutely. But I soon began to see things differently.

I learnt to enter a disused quarry near Birmingham on the lookout for orchids, or to search for ancient trees in a beechwood within sight and sound of London, with the same sense of expectation that I carried on to the Pennine moors and up into the Scottish mountains.

A week of scrambling on glacier-scraped granite, watching mountain hares and golden eagles in the back country highlands, would be followed by a few days hunting along canal banks in the Midlands for dripping brick tunnels full of bats, or following the 5,000-year-old trackways that seam the chalk hills of the south. All were wild places, I discovered.

Once I embraced this way of looking at things, I found the wild waiting around almost every corner. It took me by surprise day by day - its capacity to hide just inside the thicket, just beyond the skyline. Some days I went out on purpose to throw myself headlong at the wild, and I failed to find it or feel it.

Like a treasure in a fairytale, it kept itself in hiding. At other times, in the most unpromising of places, it revealed itself: beside a pond among damselflies, or in a railway-siding jungle of buddleia at the heart of a city, as unmistakably as in the full-blown anarchic roar of gale-driven seas on western reefs.

Man and the wild are far from mutually exclusive - in fact, they are two sides of the same coin. Those triumphant evangelists and engineers the Victorians might have thought that they could conquer the wild, inside and out. Our angsty, more sophisticated, more guilty generation knows that we can't.

“The call of the wild” is one of the most seductive and stirring phrases ever coined. Even as we fear the wild, we never stop desiring it, and we never cease from seeking it out; even though we scarcely know what it is we are so keen to find it up on the moors and out beyond the islands, over the hills and far away.

The wild waits for us everywhere - in the crack of a paving stone, in the crash of seas against cliffs, on a lonely moor, between the bricks of a sheepfold wall.

We need, as never before, the wonder and the delight of discovering wild places, or returning to them as lost familiars; of recognising their fragility and their growing need for protection; of acknowledging with a deep thrill of fear and of awe the absolute insignificance of our species in the face of a raging storm on a mountainside, the uncurling of a maidenhair fern from a limestone gryke, or the drip of bearded lichen in the shadows of a primeval oakwood.

Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places - 500 Ways to Discover the Wild, by Christopher Somerville, is published by Allen Lane, £25

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