Arcadia - a Nice Place to Call Home

It is my good fortune to spend half my life in one of the Peak District's pedestrian villages. We boast neither a car park nor a historic church. So we are spared both bikers whiling away their afternoons by revving up their engines and motorists who think that they have done their duty to culture and the countryside by driving slowly past something that was built 500 years ago. People come to our village to walk.

They come all year round - teenagers with huge backpacks and bedrolls, bare-kneed geriatrics supported by exotic walking sticks, and earnest students of limestone landscape with plastic-covered maps hanging upside down from lanyards round their necks. Today, spring bank holiday Monday, the hardy annuals will be joined by seasonal reinforcements: the casual walkers for whom our village has a special significance. They stop here to change their shoes.

Middle-aged ladies in twin-sets and pearls who travel together in sensible family saloons behave in exactly the same way as the courting couples in wire-wheeled sports cars who kiss before they disembark. They remove whatever is on their feet with the conscientious solemnity of a pious Muslim at the door of a mosque. There the comparison ends. For, rain or shine, they pull on expensive hiking boots in preparation for an afternoon or preprandial stroll in the best walking country in the world.

WH Auden wrote that what made limestone country special was its inclination to dissolve in water. That is only part of the story. Great faults run through the substrata of rock, and during the years before we began to calculate time, the earth split open. The result was towering escarpments, which we call "edges", and horizons that are always sharp and clear against the sky. When I walk my modest four miles in the early evening, I can see halfway to eternity.

The ruined barns and byres are relics of a dead civilisation as well as a more simple sort of farming. But farmers are rebuilding the dry-stone walls that have separated the fields since the enclosures. They are being recreated along exactly the lines that the rude forefathers of our hamlet accepted when their grazing rights were stolen, and they will be remade with the stones that built the original boundaries. Today's visitors will walk across living country built out of old England.

We take pride in the Peaks' unyielding landscape. But the visitors who change their shoes outside my house today will walk over hills and fields that have been made to look gentle by the colours of May. In the meadows that are already mowed, pale earth shines through the paler green of the stubble. The fields where the grass still grows are speckled with buttercups, and behind them, at the foot of the hills, Queen Anne's lace and May blossom dapple the slopes with patches of dazzling white. Even the gorse at the crest of the escarpments has changed from violent yellow to modest amber. Rabbits in the hillsides sit in the entrances to their burrows like extras from Watership Down, and hares tiptoe to reconnoitre the land before racing away with the skip and jump that made our ancestors believe that they were mad.

The farmer who writes agricultural notes for our parish magazine caused some surprise by asking his neighbours to accept that the foot-and-mouth epidemic - which passed us by but forced us into quarantine - was not without its blessings. Wildlife that he had not seen since he was a boy returned to his land. His reaction was unusual. But what else would you expect from a citizen of Arcadia?

Let me not give the impression that there is no grief and sorrow here. Each spring morning, we have a daily sadness. Frogs, which have swum happily in one of the underground streams beneath my garden, squeeze their way through cracks in the wall above the lawn and luxuriate in the dew on the grass until the sun comes out. Then they dehydrate. Those which I cannot revive with a watering can wither into desiccated corpses that remind me of the dead in Pompeii. But next spring there will be frog spawn in the old horse trough by my garden gate.

And next spring bank holiday, the walkers will be back to change their shoes. They will park in front of my house, sit on my wall and occupy the undivided attention of my dog as he lies on his window seat. As I try to work nearby, he will draw my attention to each arrival. The years of our companionship have taught me to distinguish between his various messages - welcoming, warning or suggesting (in the politest possible way) that the visitors should move on. I tell him just to rejoice. They are there because we live in the best walking country in the world.