The View from the Hill: Four Seasons in a Walker’s Britain

by Christopher Somerville

Collected notes from avid walker Christopher Somerville’s treks through the British countryside.

In Christopher Somerville’s workroom is a case of shelves that holds four hundred and fifty notebooks. Their pages are creased and stained with mud, blood, flattened insects, beer glass rings, smears of plant juice, and gallons of sweat. Everything Somerville has written about walking the British countryside has had its origin in these little black and red books.
 
During the lockdowns and enforced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Somerville began to revisit this treasury of notes, spanning forty years of exploring on foot. The View from the Hill pulls together the best of his written collections, following the cycle of the seasons from a freezing January on the Severn Estuary to the sight of sunrise on Christmas morning from inside a prehistoric burial mound. In between are hundreds of walks to discover toads in a Cumbrian spring, trout in a Hampshire chalk stream, a lordly red stag at the autumn rut on the Isle of Mull, and three thousand geese at full gabble in the wintry Norfolk sky. Somerville’s writing enables readers to enjoy these magnificent walks without stirring from the comfort of home.
 

320 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2022

About the author

Christopher Somerville is a travel writer & 'Walking Correspondent' of The Times. His long-running ‘A Good Walk’ series appears every Saturday in the Times Weekend section. He has written some 40 books, many about his travels on foot in various parts of the world

Reviews

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This seems to have taken me ages to plough through.

In this admittedly quite long book, Somerville gathers together notes from his many notebooks that he's amassed over the years and then throws them into a loose semblance of a themed book. The theme obviously is four seasons and the book is split as such, but there is no real connecting factor between each of the vignettes he offers. We jump from one place to another and one subject to another, which can be a little jarring at times.

Some of the offerings are half a page long, others a couple of pages. Sometimes it feels as if you're reading a social media post or a magazine article or a children's book with A-Z references, like L is for lichen (I'm not sure this was what L was but you catch my drift😆 ).

Overall, it's ok but just that. There are no standout stories and the covid references now seem outdated and redundant funnily enough (oh how times change). There were a few stories that I liked more than others; studying bats, visiting Dungeness and Orford Ness, some riverine studies.

By the end though I was admittedly skim reading some of the extracts to get to ones I liked.

A 3 star read but one I wouldn't revisit.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

What do you do when, as a lifelong walker and walking journalist, you find yourself trapped at home and its environs for months at a time by a worldwide pandemic? For Christopher Somerville the answer was obvious; he spent the time looking back over a lifetime’s record of his walks in 450 notebooks and turned some of the highlights into a book, The View from the Hill. I love reading books about epic journeys on foot, so these short accounts (mostly around one to three pages in length) didn’t initially appeal, but having finished the book I’ve realised that I’ve enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Some pieces are little more than light hearted squibs, particularly the occasional ‘alphabetical’ entries: N is for Notebook, U is for Umbrella, etc, but others are observant, insightful, and richly evocative of a particular landscape, environment or occasion. I’ve read The View from the Hill slowly, on the basis of one or two entries a day and it’s definitely a book for dipping in to or as a bedside companion when walking isn’t possible.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kind of knew from the contents page that this was going to be a 4 star for me. I'm a nature writing lover but the seasons I love most of autumn, winter, and spring, in that order. And while the writing in this is lovely, there are some beautiful moments, lots of laughs, many a pub recommendation, and a long list of walks I was looking up along the way, so much of this book is summer.
The author has nailed summer, it's written perfectly, and especially over the hotter days this week it's been a joy to bask in. But to then follow on the autumn and winter, those chapters fell a bit flat.

I wasn't the biggest fan of the more jokey chapters but not did I dislike them! And while I cracked a smile at them to begin with the fact that autumn and winter already had so few pages for themselves, to then have those less-nature more-conversational snappy chapters take up the content for them...i felt disappointed.

For anyone else, not an autumn/winter person, I'm sure this book would have got the full five, but for me unfortunately it ended up just shy of the mark.
If you are a summer reader - highly recommend.

[John Ollerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fine fare, it’s like walking with the great man and listening to his ramblings and oh his wonderful ode to the joys of the Tan Hill Inn and the nectar that is Theakstons Old Peculiar, well it is sublime.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not very keen on lockdown books. You would think it would provide the ideal writing conditions, but here is a book that feels cobbled together and is, by the authors admission, based on notes made in hundreds of notebooks from past years. Each chapter is 2 or 3 pages long and set in a different place on a different subject so there is little narrative flow. As I was reading this in one go I found it too choppy and wanted to put it down, as though it’s meant to be one of those books you look at occasionally when you have a spare 10 minutes. It is however well written and probably quite a good read on a commute or if you have a short attention span.

[Tim James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book that just makes you want to get out and explore the hidden corners of Britain. Perfect book to read through the winter where you can just loose yourself in his interesting , amusing writing style.

[Winny Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love every page of this book. It's funny, interesting,inspiring and truly uplifting.Beautifully written and so evocative of the countryside in all seasons.