Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I want to tell you why I love podcasting. Hi, my name's Tommy Dixon,

and I make podcasts for the BBC. I'm a big fan of stories, always loved a good book. But when I started

commuting for my first job, I discovered podcasts. I was blown away by how a creative idea and the right

mixture of sounds could take you into a whole new world full of incredible stories. You know, the type that make you go, wow. And that kind of inspired me to

give it a go myself, which to cut a long story short led to a BBC training scheme and a whole

new career giving other people that exact same feeling. So if you want to hear amazing stories

that make you go wow like I did, they're just a tap or click away on BBC

sounds.

This is a BBC Radio 4 download. You're listening to me, Claire Balding, with another edition

of ramblings.

It's a bright, breezy winter's day in Cornwall, heavy belt of rain has just passed through.

In this series of ramblings

we are discovering walking as a way of bonding bonding bonding with friends bonding with other people

in this case bonding with place because Philip Marsden is with me who's written the most incredible

book called rising ground but you've always been intrigued by how we link with certain

landscapes and what makes certain places special? Yes, I mean, it was a subject that had been around

for years and I sort of rediscovered it, if you like. And the idea of place is something I wasn't

really familiar with as a sort of concept and I realized that

it actually informed not only my own life but a lot of the journeys and travels and books that I'd

done previously particularly interested in people that are sort of defined by the place they live in

whether it's mountains or the sea or the coast or whatever and I then hung this particular book around a move to this landscape that we're in now.

And I was rather alarmed by what I felt about the place when I first saw it and fell in love with it completely and physically,

...