Spending our lives sat on wheely chairs in front of a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, Peter Moore wonders whether there is more to life than this?

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For years writers, poets and artists have tried to capture the alluring beauty of England. The rolling hills, the winding roads and bridal paths, the village green and the mill pond.

One who had a particular stab at this was a German called Carl Moritz, who arrived in the country during the summer months of 1782. Charmed by the picturesque rural landscapes of England, Moritz wrote, as he passed the village of Richmond:

‘Under my feet sprang the springy turf that only grows on English ground on one side a wood such as Nature could not create more beautiful; on the other the Thames with its shelving bank that rises like an amphitheatre, and a glimpse of high white houses seen through the dark green of trees that lie shimmering in the valley.’

Moritz was obviously a little more expressive than the stereotypical German of today, but at the end of the eighteenth century, he was far from alone. Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge passed their days writing about the joys of the Lake District, whilst Constable transferred the glorious tranquillity of the Suffolk countryside to canvas.

But their odes to rural England transpired to be something of an elegy. As they were busy working, the majority of the rural population was streaming towards the filthy industrial cities looking for work and prosperity. As the population of Britain boomed, in the rural villages the numbers stagnated. By the early nineteenth century the death rattle of rural England could hardly be heard over the noise of the sprawling towns.

In the two centuries since, we have become town-dwellers. Today we don’t pass our days working in the fields or surrounded by animals or forests, but staring a 16” monitors and rolling our right hands from side to side around a 15cm square mat.

Ours is a society that is governed by flashing boxes and an array of beeps. A society in which blackberries and apples have ceased to be edible fruits and have become little boxes of technology.

As the world markets tumbled down last month, one successful owner of a US hedge fund quit the industry having taken millions by betting against sub-prime mortgages. Andrew Lahde wrote an open letter, declaring that most of the banking industry was populated by ‘idiots’.

‘I will let others try to amass nine, 10 or 11 figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck,” he wrote, citing a life of back-to-back business appointments relieved only by a two-week annual holiday in which financiers are still “glued to their Blackberries’. His final words of advice were, ‘Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.’

And Lahde, however smug he may seem, does have a point. Outside the cities, the earth is still orbiting the sun, crops are still growing in the fields, jackdaws are still roosting on the tree tops and the English countryside, albeit with the addition of the odd Tesco Local, still exists as Wordsworth and his chums depicted it.

We don’t have any towering mountains, fearsome waterfalls, sizzling beaches or deep canyons, but the English countryside is filled to the brim with magical landscapes and panoramas. From Stonehenge to the Malvern Hills, the Peak District, the Downs, the Fens and the Lakes from Coniston to Windermere, England is waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation. And what better entrance to this kingdom exists, than a gusty voyage across the Channel towards the fabled White Cliffs of Dover?

Tags: Britain, Lifestyle //