For me, it's not so much place as purpose. And that purpose is a multiday country ramble, a scree-sliding shinny up picturesque hills, a cliffside clamber. In short, paradise is one great long footpath, so almost any place I can hang my walking stick is home. I've ambled along wonderful trails in Canada, the United States and France, but my heart (or legs, anyway) belong to Britain. With thousands of miles of marked trails, Britain has more walkway than motorway. Hundreds of paths of varying length and difficulty crisscross the island, from the gentle flats of the Thames River and Norfolk Broads to the demanding ascents of the Lake District and Scotland.
And they're all (usually) so welcoming. The first time I went on walkabout, with my son, was in the Cotswalds -- pretty much everybody's idea of picture-postcard England, with its gently rolling hills, copper-beech forests, pre-foot-and-mouth flocks of sheep and green, green everywhere; from certain vantage points, you would swear nothing had changed in hundreds of years, that a Thomas Hardy milkmaid might appear beside a mill pond, or Cromwell's army might come clopping over a rise.
The trails are usually well marked, although you really should have one or more of the Ordinance Survey Maps -- amazingly detailed charts covering every brook and cranny ( http://www.ordsvy.gov.uk) -- or a specialized guidebook. It's very easy to get lost; I've missed a single waymark and gone badly astray. Since almost any footpath crosses private lands and pastures, my worry early on was not so much over cow pies and sheep dip as that there might be big, fierce farm dogs. Well, there are, but these fields and meadows have rights-of-way for walkers, and I guess the dogs have learned that anyone with a backpack is no danger. They've never been threatening, only mildly curious.
For some months, the foot-and-mouth scare closed most footpaths; when my companion and I were there in late March, we were limited to walking a bovine-free shingle beach at Norfolk -- picturesque, but hard slogging.
But now most paths seem to be open and, if I must recommend one (and I'm told I must), then let it be the Pembrokeshire Coast Path of Wales. The whole trail is 304 kilometres; to walk it entirely takes about two weeks. But it's perfectly fine to start in the middle. We began at St. David's, Europe's smallest cathedral town, its few streets full of bright Welsh cottages, pastelled in pink and green and blue. In the middle of the very quiet night, I was awakened by a scuffling noise. I looked out the window of our B & B and there was one of those doughty little British badgers, snacking unconcernedly on trash.
Then up the very rugged Welsh coast, riddled with coves and inlets and rocky beaches that would have been perfect for smugglers and are home to seals and dolphins. There's a spectacularly bleak beauty as your eye follows the indented coast for miles. The air is clear, the cliff walls you walk along -- sometimes a bit precariously -- are full of gorse and wildflowers. Gulls and puffins and razorbills nest and squawk in great numbers, and there are few other wayfarers. One day, at low tide, we saw stranded a crab the size of a large coffee table, next to a great black-backed gull feeding on a small shark. You'll even come across the occasional dolmen, an ancient tomb with one great flat rock placed atop upright rocks. After a few days of such unpeopled activity, you begin to feel that the place is yours.
The sea stretches away to Ireland. The morning mists burn off and the summer sun off the water is hotter than you expected. Walking north from the pretty port of Fishguard (where you can catch the fast ferry to Ireland), the view back -- the harbour, the cliff-top houses, the blue-green water, the bobbing boats -- is breathtaking. I was, as they say, gobsmacked by the place. Martin Levin is Books Editor of The Globe and Mail.