Hang your hat amid the sheer, isolated desolation of Whitendale Hanging Stones and – says the Ordnance Survey – you’re at the very centre of Great Britain and its outlying islands.

The lovely valley of St John’s in the Vale is one of the quieter areas of the Lake District, the fells
either side of it far less frequented than many elsewhere.

The bustling tourist town of Ambleside makes an excellent base as a walking centre, with a fine variety of local routes from which to choose.

A renovated extravaganza of locks, lengths and pounds strikes through the South Pennines, linking the Victorian industrial behemoths of south Lancashire’s cotton towns with the woollen and worsted centres of Yorkshire’s Calder Valley.

Leeds was once famously described by Charles Dickens as ‘one of the beastliest places in England’. Well, he would hardly recognise the place these days.

Why jet off to Madeira to walk the famous levadas (man-made watercourses) when Pennine Yorkshire can offer something very similar?

The rugged moorland and deep, wooded valleys of the South Pennines have long inspired writers and poets, including the Brontë sisters and Ted Hughes, and provided recreation for generations of mill workers.

The North Pennines, Britain’s second largest AONB, is one of the most remote and unspoilt places in the country, and hence often described as ‘England’s last wilderness‘.

Cocooned in the spectacular chasm of Great Langdale’s enclosed trough of a valley, The Old Dungeon Ghyll’s Hikers Bar has drawn countless walkers to its welcoming room since 1949, when it was converted from a shippon

Located just to the south of the historic city of Durham this picturesque walk encircles two huge loops of the River Wear. The section of the route just past Shincliffe Hall follows paths that were extensively lobbied for by the Ramblers.