Christopher Somerville works from home as a writer and journalist, looking out across a wide and stunning view that takes in much of north-east Bristol and over to the hills near Bath. So although he lives in and enjoys the city there’s always a view to the hills and the landscape which provides the inspiration for his many books and newspaper articles.

He says, "Bristol is an excellent place for a walker to live – 40 minutes travel in any direction takes you to a diversity of countryside; from Somerset Levels to the Welsh Hills, and from the greatest light show on earth (yes, the sunset over the Bristol Channel) to the pretty villages and valleys of the Cotswolds."

Here is the first in a series of walks he will be compiling for Stanfords' readers to follow in the Southwest each month. More...

Squirrels had been harvesting the green hazelnuts along Woodlands Lane; the split shells went crunching under our boots as we set out from Berwick St John on a cloudy morning. Beyond the gabled old house of Woodlands there was a bit of a pull up the breast of the hill, and then the exhilaration of a good old step-out along one of the ancient ridgeways that ride the nape of these south Wiltshire downs. Jane, a South Downs girl born and bred, strode out with a big smile on her face, delighting in the poppies along the cornfield headlands, the nodding harebells and powder-blue buttons of scabious in the trackway verges, and the sense of being high up among the swooping hills of proper chalk-and-flint country.

Steep hill slopes whose sheep-nibbled turf had never been disturbed by any plough plunged away to flat and sinuous valley bottoms, where the pale coffee colour of the newly harrowed earth lay streaked with darker chocolate, sign of watercourses still active under the soil. More...

A dawn start on West Anstey Common, watching a magnificent red deer stag roaring rivals away from his harem of hinds. How to follow that? A pint and a sandwich at Tarr Farm Inn didn’t hurt at all, and we strode out across Tarr Steps among the gold and green oaks of the Barle Valley just as if the western sky were not heaping with ominously slaty clouds.

No-one really knows how long the ancient clapper bridge of Tarr Steps has spanned the nut-brown River Barle in its narrow combe. Saurian in shape, resistant to flood waters yet built to allow them free passage, this subtle old bridge might have been placed across the river by medieval monks, or it could have been carrying travellers dry-shod over the Barle for as long as 3,000 years. Its flagstone decking rang underfoot, and the swollen river rushed through the rough piers in curling trails of bubbles.

High above the valley an enthusiastic dog came to meet us More...

A blackbird was singing on the garden wall of Portesham House, where stone lions couchant guarded the porch. Thomas Masterman Hardy, who lived here in the Dorset downs as a young boy in 1778, was destined for fame as a much-loved sailor and man of action. Horatio Nelson’s close friend and trusted Flag Captain died loaded with honours in September 1839. In that month his namesake, the future novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, became the tiniest of twinkles in his mother’s eye at Higher Bockhampton, a few miles over the hills to the east. It’s not the great writer who is commemorated by the tall stone Hardy’s Monument on the downs, but the fighting admiral from little Portesham village.

Near the path to Hardy’s Monument crouches the Hell Stone, a Neolithic tomb resembling a heavily armoured giant crab, whose nine massive stone legs support a huge capstone of flint-studded conglomerate. The Devil, playing a game of quoits, hurled the Hell Stone here from More...

I hadn’t made a mistake after 30 years – the ridge-top village of Drewsteignton, perched on the northern edge of Dartmoor, was still totally charming. There were the pretty cottages and the Drewe Arms as I recalled them, bowed low under thatch on the diminutive village square, all presided over by the tall tower of Holy Trinity church. When I was last here the pub had been run as a front-room business by Mabel Mudge, 83 years old and spry as a lamb. ‘Oh, you remember Mabel!’ smiled the man I got chatting to on the path over to the River Teign. ‘Yes, she retired when she got to 99. 75 years she ran that place, and it never changed a bit.’

There was a wonderful view from the neighbouring ridge back to Drewsteignton huddled on its hilltop, and a sight of moor ponies grazing the gorse with streaming manes and tails. The bridle path ran at the rim of the Teign’s steep wooded gorge, then slanted down through oak and silver birch to where the river ran flashing with sunlight under More...

Our June Walk of the Month finds writer and journalist Christopher Somerville bombing across Dartmoor...

Whatever the Tradesman’s Arms put in their beef jalfrezi on curry night, it revved me right up for a brilliant walk the following day. The hamlet of Scorriton, sitting tight under the eastern rim of Dartmoor, almost lost its pub a few years back, and the shock of that threat galvanised the Tradesman’s Arms into a whole sparky new life. The food’s good, the beer’s excellent, and the social life that revolves around the little inn, from poetry nights to quizzes and singsongs to story-telling, is just amazing. If only all rural communities could respond like tiny Scorriton to the gradual sapping of their resources!

I strode up the stony lane to Chalk Ford like a man on a mission. Misty weather was forecast for later in the day, and though I had my trusty Satmap GPS device in my pack, I didn’t particularly want to find myself in a Dartmoor pea-souper. More...

There’s definitely something strange about the river country along the Severn Estuary. Whether it’s the influence of the mile-wide tideway, the big overarching skies, or the highly idiosyncratic dwellings and their occupants down the twisty lanes that end abruptly at the river, to walk here is to step away from the everyday into some parallel, Severn-centred universe.

Setting out from Brookend, a few miles north of Bristol on the ‘English bank’, Jane and I found ourselves straight away in a tangle of wide old green lanes. You feel that the landscape must be flat, so close to such a big river, so it comes as a shock to top a rise of ground and find a 20-mile view unrolling. To the east the long South Cotswold ridge, May Hill and the heavy tree cover of the Forest of Dean swelling in the west, and between them the Severn hurrying seaward in a muscular double bend of low-tide tan and silver – we halted to gaze our fill before hurrying down the slope into Purton.

In the early 19th century a 16-mile-long canal was dug from More...

Our second Walk of the Month from writer and journalist Christopher Somerville, who lives and loves the Bristol area…

A male blackbird, yellow bill a-tremble, was making tentative inquiries of a drab brown female on a bough in the New Inn's garden as I started down the hill towards Blagdon Lake. The celandines were still curled tight and green along the high-banked lane, but there was a breath of warmth in the low sun, more than Somerset had felt for the past three months.

For well over a century Blagdon Lake water has been piped to Bristol's taps, ten miles over the hills to the north. Crossing the broad dam of the lake, I heard the subdued roar of the flood-engorged weir where snowmelt and swollen streams were sending their waters surging down the spillway. I followed the fishermen's path through the trees More...