Similarly epic landscapes await on a hike along the Jock’s Road - running for almost 14 miles through moorland, craggy passes and along winding rivers, it’s a rewarding challenge for those looking to embrace the wild outdoors. An easy highlight is the one-hour circular route to the Falls of Bruar, hidden amid larch trees and crossed by a stone bridge that wouldn’t look out of place in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. This is the Highlands at its most emblematic: dense pine forests, wild stags and babbling brooks, with ample opportunity for hiking. Almost twice the size of the Lakes, the Cairngorms sprawls across over 425sq miles of central Scotland. Head around 200 miles north from the Lake District, and you’ll eventually meet another of the UK’s national parks - the largest, in fact. Discover one of these areas instead and, who knows, you might feel inspired to put pen - or paintbrush - to paper. But across the UK there are similarly soul-stirring landscapes ripe for exploration, many of which receive a fraction of the visitors - from wild Highland peaks roamed by stags to sleepy, reed-rippled waterways best explored by boat. The Lake District has long been synonymous with outdoor escapes, and now, post-lockdown, crowds are once again filling its car parks, eager to soak up some of the loftiest and most poetic scenery England has to offer. Although this region is famously prone to rain (as evidenced by its green, green landscapes), the wet weather doesn’t deter visitors - 15 million people a year come to this vast swathe of Cumbria, to walk its fells, sail its lakes and follow in the footsteps of some of the English language’s most-celebrated wordsmiths. It describes it as ‘a priceless and irreplaceable asset not only to the UK but to humanity as a whole’.

UNESCO clearly thinks highly of it, awarding the national park World Heritage Site status in 2017.

Is this Britain’s most inspiring landscape? You only need to look at the list of writers and poets who’ve immortalised the Lake District’s fells and fields to see it makes a strong case: Wordsworth, Potter, Coleridge, Tennyson, Ruskin, Shelley, Keats, to name a few.

Village hidden in rain