Shropshire

I found the land of lost content last week, west of the Clee Hills in the Shropshire Housman wrote about, but hardly knew. It is deep England, thick with trees, stone-built farms that look like forts and tracks in gullies cut by ancient feet.

The villages here have rhythmic names: Bouldon, Peaton and Cockshutford — or simple Heath, where there is now no village at all, only the pure Norman chapel standing in grass with its long old iron key on a hook outside. It was built for a settlement lost at the Black Death. Few sounds here are unnatural: you hear birdsong more than cars or planes.

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I was riding my horse James, with two friends on Cassie and Rubin, along paths bursting with nettles. We scrambled over streams and slippery red mud on to the Brown Clee Hill by Nordy Bank, where our horses nibbled at turf on Neolithic ramparts.