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Historical names for February include the unappealing Old English terms Solmonath (mud month) and Kale-monath (cabbage month). I’m pretty sure the Hawaiian word for February, Pepeluali, refers to neither mud nor cabbage. 

In Finland, February is Helmikuu, the month of the pearl, when snow melts on branches and forms droplets. In Poland it is Luty, mean- ing freezing cold. For Macedonians, it is the month of felling trees and chopping wood, Sechko. 

I was definitely in a mud month here, rather than a pearl month. The mountains may have been calling, but they felt farther away than ever. I had one of my occasional bouts of wondering if I should give up limiting myself to this single map. 

‘What a stupid idea all this is,’ I moaned. ‘It’s cold. It’s wet. I could either be in bed or in Bali.’ 

There are two types of people in the world, those who love snow and those who do not. There is no such thing as a child who does not like snow. A few people have valid objections to snow: those with bro- ken hips, and confounded commuters, for example. But anyone else whose heart does not leap at the first falling snowflakes is a miserable curmudgeon. There, I’ve said it! I get as excited by snow today as I did back on those glorious, rare occasions at school when someone in the classroom yelled, ‘It’s snowing!’ and cheery pandemonium broke out. 

The south of England being a mild sort of place, the best I hope for each year is a covering of a few inches, a couple of sledging outings and a day or two of jolly disruption. Today, after weeks of rain, I was excited to get out into the snow that had fallen overnight, not least of all because I had also noticed the dawn arriving a little earlier. It was nice to get away from the daily grind of book-writing in my shed. Snow makes everything feel more adventurous, though the sprinkling here 

couldn’t compare to the majesty of hauling a sledge across Greenland’s vast silence, relishing being self-contained with a couple of friends and very far from civilisation. But I was still thrilled. 

‘As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens’ goes the proverb, with a nod to scientific veracity. Earth receives the least sunlight at the winter solstice, yet the coldest temperatures come later, a seasonal lag caused by more solar energy leaving the atmosphere than arriving. Today, the snow muffled the world and quietened everything. I could hear a buzzard and the cawing of rooks, but the usual motorways and sirens sounded softer. 

Right, Humphreys. Stop procrastinating. You haven’t even started yet!’ I rebuked myself, and stepped out into the rain to begin. As always, solvitur ambulando, I solve things by walking. 

It is the gloom that does for me in winter. Seven of my past eight grid squares had been grey and wet, in a winter where the rain never ended and the sun never shone. I was sagging like a feeble houseplant, pale and etiolated owing to lack of light. If I could hibernate until spring returned, I would. 

I dearly wished to dig out my passport and head somewhere far away where sunlight shone hot on my back. California called. Emigration enticed. Marrakesh, maybe? I find the dark half of the year harder to endure every year. But just when I am about to crack, I recognise tiny changes heralding the approach of spring and the return of all good things. 

So it encouraged me to hear a definite increase in birdsong this morning, a ratcheting up of woodland activity. Perhaps life was 

Coppicing 

returning, and perhaps my own life was too. For today was Imbolc, the Gaelic festival celebrating the onset of spring that occurs halfway between the solstice and the equinox. 

The Right to Roam, Enclosures Acts, and the issues of accessing the countryside.
Rain was still falling hard a week later when I cycled past a garden with two life-size sculptures of giraffes, towards a modern red-brick Catholic church. On the church wall was a statue of a bored-looking Saint George stabbing down at the dragon with about as much enthu- siasm as a community service litter picker. Old George up there took quite the journey to sainthood in rainy England from his beginnings as a soldier in the Roman army. He is the patron saint of not only England but also Georgia, Ethiopia, Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia, and Corinthians FC in São Paulo. 

I turned right at the church into a maze of terraced streets. In one house I saw a dozen trophies shining in an upstairs window. A child’s bedroom, I guessed, proud of their efforts and achievement. An enor- mous railway embankment towered above the houses and overshad- owed the streets. It led onto a viaduct whose ten arches were visible from grid squares for miles around. I was understanding the lie of the land better now, getting a clearer idea of how all these places fitted 

together.

I hid my bike in a hedge and set out to explore the grid square on foot, keen to see what the world would offer to my imagination today. My voice sounded small as I hummed a song to myself beneath an outsize bridge rumbling with overhead lorries. The solitude I experi- ence in nature is very different from the loneliness that often keeps me company in daily life on this map. It is one of the appeals of swapping Wi-Fi for wellies and going for a wet schlep through muddy, empty landscapes. 

My outings had recalibrated my preconceptions about how much of my map was covered with concrete and shown that much still lent itself to vigorous, solitary hikes. Though moulded by man – absolute- ly – the countryside is not irrevocably wrecked, even in this crowded corner of the country. 

Busy days and rain falling. Chasing my tail and going nowhere. Horizons closing in. Boring routines and putting away the weekly shop. So, when I got an opportunity to escape, I bolted for the woods that the random-number-generator ordered me towards. I bustled around grabbing my camera, rain gear and Thermos flask. I sloshed a can of tomato soup into a pan, added a tin of chickpeas, a handful of frozen peas and sweetcorn, and a glug of chilli sauce. By the time I was swad- dled in waterproofs, my improvised lunch was hot, and I was out of the door and onto my bike with a smile returning to my face. 

The darkest hour may be just before the dawn, but the darkest morning comes well after midwinter, when the jollity of Christmas has long since faded away.The latest sunrise is almost three weeks after the December solstice. It might be a fresh calendar year and a new start, but as I cycled out today it was one of the bleakest weeks of the year, with barely eight hours of daylight on my map. 

The January sun, when it eventually showed up, skulked low and reluctant across the sky. There had been a roaring in the wind all night and the rain fell in floods. And now in the morning I was on my way masochistically to what looked to be one of the most nature-deplet- ed squares on my map, in one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet. This crowded map lies on the outskirts of a large city, so there are many pressures on its space, including farming, transport, 

Gardens 

industry, housing, and recreation. Everywhere you look, you see human impacts on the landscape, ranging from landfill sites to relaid hedges. 

There was little need for the cartographer to use any green ink here; the whole square was a grey grid of boxes representing buildings. Colour came only from two busy roads, marked in yellow. There were just four scraps of footpath, little more than a couple of hundred metres of cracked tarmac, broken glass and dog mess. I felt in more need than usual of nature’s gladness, but could I find any of it here? 

The tragedy of the commons, that individuals ignore what is best for society in pursuing personal gain, suggests that humans can- not manage a common resource. Why do we care so little about the Earth? Is it because we assume it is limitless? Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s perspective on Earth changed after flying to space. He said, ‘You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.” ’ 

Why do we care so little about nature and its tragic decline? Is it because we have stopped noticing it? It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. It is not that the world is too small, but that we miss so much of it. 

Litter was strewn over today’s grid square like wrapping paper on Christmas morning. I didn’t want to be disheartened by it on every out- ing, but nor did I want to not see these problems or accept them as nor- mal and just shrug my shoulders. I live far from the cascades of contour lines, miles of moorland or rushing rivers I relish. Could I really scratch my adventurous itch on this tame map, bereft of mountains, oceans or dragons? I doubted it this morning and wished I was exploring Siberia rather than suburbia and this odd ecotone, a transition area between the city, suburbs and countryside. 

Out of all the country’s maps, mine was down in the rubbish rel- egation zone for adventure potential. But that also made this project a more universal one than if I lived, say, on map 402 in the scenic Scottish Highlands or map 24 in the Peak District. 

December is a quiet month. I looked out over a rolling landscape of empty fields divided into squares by long, straight hedges. The only sounds were of distant cars. When did it become normal to hear more traffic than wildlife? Everything felt subdued. But I was glad to be beginning this project at the tail end of a year so that I could experience everything perking up in the brighter days to come. 

With practice, a map becomes as clear as a picture, and almost as full of imagined detail. This week’s grid square seemed to be as hilly as almost anywhere on my map, a rare treat for me in this flat, sanitised region. I adore land with contour lines, curvy and sensuous, filled with possibility. 

One motivation for exploring a square each week, come rain or shine, was to make being out in nature part of my routine. I hoped that becoming connected with where I live, with its weather and seasons, would keep me attuned to the seedlings pushing through pavements, the migrating birds passing overhead, the provenance of the food I eat, and reveal some interesting new running routes too. 

Taking just a few minutes every month to climb a tree, which I’d done for the past three years, had certainly made me happier. Each time I returned to the tree I was surprised by how much nature had changed in the past few weeks. Fun, too, had been my year of full-moon forays, getting outdoors for a run, ride, walk or swim on every full moon, and also a year of enjoying coffee outside at least monthly. If hospital gar- dens help people to heal, if doctors now prescribe exercise in nature, and if the ‘Natural Health Service’ addresses a range of conditions, then committing to fifty-two outdoor missions sounded like a sensible 

undertaking. By now the habit of heading out once a week with my camera and notebook felt comfortably established. 

It was a flat, grey day beneath a flat, grey December sky. The river flowing through today’s square was flat and grey, rippling as the tide nurdled ever lower. My mood, however, was neither flat nor grey. I was looking forward to this one.