I walked through a preconceived landscape two days ago on the hottest day of the year so far. What I mean is that I had preconceptions about what it would offer me. Landscape as shopping mall. I “go into nature” looking for things, though I don’t like to admit it. I like to pretend I accept the ambivalence of landscape but really I expect some subjectivity from it. I want its blessing, its confirmations, it’s healing powers. I want the right configuration of hedges, trees just so. A tudor farmhouse, no cars outside, wooden windows not PVC. I want a track, not a tarmac road. I want the shadows long, the grass-greens muted, small flies hanging in the mottled shade of spring hedgerows. I want music on the wind.

What did I get?

A dose of my hard-to-please self. Picking each scene apart, hoping for better from the next. In my notebook I wrote: Walking is the great hope that something wonderful awaits and the knowledge that views can change in a moment. And it is also long hours of trudgery.

I also got all of the following, for which I am assuredly grateful.

Showers of blackthorn blossoms so white they were blue, torrents of liquid blackbird song. I found myself awkwardly joining a pilgrimage of cows heading to a feeding trough while the farmer came quad-propelled from the other direction. I walked among brimstones the size of apples, fat with springtime. Large and cabbage whites, a ruined sandstone building which must have been grand in its time judging by its well-dressed walls. Fossilised hearth and door lintels, trees where the floor had been, sheep for inhabitants. I stood inside the house for a while enjoying the views up and down the valley whilst orange tips played, ground ivy grew, and nettles both dead and stinging imperceptibly waved in the warm breeze. Buzzards were the cherry on top of every thermal-producing hill. Walking down the valley from Cold Ashton I came across a grand old sycamore that appeared to have dropped rocks instead of leaves last autumn.

Celandine and daisies, buttercup and bluebells. The tiny masterpiece of germander speedwell.

Before the dam of summer bursts open, there is something sedate about an English spring. Daffodils, primroses and white blossom all look like they have been considerately and sensibly planted by a cosmic granny. I was handed a huge dose of wildness though as I toiled my way up an overgrown path of wild garlic and hawthorn yearlings and a tawny owl loosed itself from the gnarled tree above my head and tumbled into the valley air. “Holy shit that was an owl!” I said out of habit to my dog, though she was 20 miles away flouncing enviously on the sofa at home. Under my feet last year’s leaf litter and constellations of purple dog violet.

I had walked for two hours and seen no-one when a woman and her two black spaniels approached. I heard her before I saw her, as she shouted after the older of the two dogs whose bum was planted firmly in the grass in protest at the heat. The dog won, and the woman had to turn back and somehow bribe the resistant dog. I saw the three of them later on and further down the path, dogs running in a circle, their tails conducting a fierce symphony.

More wild garlic, one tiny Herb Robert flower, a beehive in the crook of a hawthorn tree.

I stopped for lunch before noon. Sandwich, apple, water. Below me a tiny sprig of cuckoo flower bloomed boisterously from some hoof-pitted boggy ground. I went down to see it, my favourite springtime flower, and put my foot in the only moist patch for miles. I used my phone to identify some Hairy Bittercress and it told me I hadn’t seen it before. Worth the boggy foot.

And then two birds I still can’t identify. In my notebook I wrote: YELLOW BIRD (back) cream coloured front, long tail, longish beak. TSEEEP. Pair on a wire. One shit as it flew off. Answers on a postcard please.

Woodpigeons lack any kind of grace as they leave their perches. “Who put me in this tree anyway?” they seem to complain. They use their wings as battering rams and make as much noise as possible. My wife says they remind her of my dad. I love that because I see them all the time. They are my favourite pigeon and I get it – they are full of human character. They are also my number one confusion species. I always think I’ve seen something else but it almost always turns out to be a woodpigeon.

Peacock butterflies, cowslip, lambs a-plenty, a kestrel getting unceremoniously wind-ruffled on a telephone wire. Mellifluous skylark. A tiny broken egg and yolk on the path, but I can't find the nest.

I am in the final mile, at the highest point of the walk. I drop a pin on Google maps and save it to a list named “Views” with the note Great place to see the valley on a spring evening, I imagine. When the sun is setting and the light is more favourably angled for photographs than it is now. Come on landscape, shape up. Never enough, never enough. I chide myself for thinking these thoughts but truth is they’re as persistent today as the primroses, kestrels, and owls that bring me joy. Attention transforms land into landscape, and sometimes can’t the sun just play pall and set in the East damn it!