An unpopular position, stated plainly: the hills are better in bad weather.

Not dangerous weather. There is nothing romantic about being blown off a ridge, and anyone who tells you otherwise has been lucky rather than skilled. I mean the ordinary bad — the low grey days, drizzle that never becomes rain, wind that makes you walk at a slight angle for six hours.

Three reasons.

The first is that you get the place to yourself. On a blue Saturday in August, Mam Tor has a queue. In horizontal drizzle it has you, a trig point, and a crow that looks personally insulted.

The second is that bad weather makes a landscape legible. Sun flattens everything into a postcard. Cloud moves, and as it moves it reveals things in sequence — a wall, then the field the wall belongs to, then the shape of the valley that explains why the wall is there at all. You learn the bones of a place faster in poor visibility than in good.

The third is harder to defend but truer than the other two: it changes what you're doing. A clear day is sightseeing. A grim one is just walking, and walking without a view is when the thinking happens. Every useful idea I have had in the last three years arrived somewhere between hour two and hour four of a day I would not have chosen.

The counter-argument is obvious and I accept it. Sometimes you want the view. Sometimes you have driven ninety minutes and would like to see a hill rather than infer one.

But if you only go out when it's fine, you'll go out about eleven times a year in this country, and you'll never learn what your waterproof is actually like.