I spent a year exploring exclusively in my local neighborhood. Here’s what I learned

It wasn’t so many years ago that anyone curious about the world, interested in nature, or yearning for adventure would just walk out of their front door and do their best to find it where they were. The notion of flying across the globe simply to have an adventure is a relatively recent one. Even younger is the awareness of the damage we do by jetting off to visit those wild places we love.

I asked myself whether I could perhaps search closer to home to feel and do the things I love about traveling—curiosity, nature, silence, simplicity, and wildness.

The answer was obvious, right? Of course I couldn’t. I live in a boring, gray landscape on the fringes of a big city. It was all very well for American author Henry David Thoreau to wander around the beautiful woods of Walden in Massachusetts, pontificating about going confidently in the direction of his dreams: He had a fabulous lake on his doorstep and an Instagrammable (even if he didn’t know it) log cabin to live in. I was living a life of quiet desperation under the sodium glow of streetlights, dreaming of the adventures I used to go on. Or could I?

I know I am privileged. I’ve been lucky enough to cycle across continents, walk across countries and deserts, and row across oceans (although I didn’t feel so lucky during those vomiting, buttock-chafed weeks). I have seen beautiful Arctic ice formations and traveled to noisy tropical jungles. I have lots of selfies to prove it. Well done, me…

But I have also spent years encouraging the idea of micro-adventures—finding enjoyment in squeezing short, simple, affordable adventures around the busyness of everyday life. A lot of the rewards of those micro-adventures come from looking for the opportunities for adventure, rather than grumbling about the barriers in the way. So I decided to look again at my local neighborhood and have a go at searching for nearby nature and wildness.

The year I spent exploring my backyard was not a daring adventure, but it was an eye-opening experience and one of the most interesting, educational journeys of my life.

Adventures without objectives are not adventures: They are vacations. So, I added a little structure to my vague ideas. I bought the map that covers the area where I live, a standard Ordnance Survey map on a 1:25,000 scale. It covers an area of roughly 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers, divided into 400 individual one-kilometer grid squares.

Each week, for a year, I went out and explored one randomly chosen grid square in an attempt to see “everything” within it: Every footpath and forest; every factory, every burned-out car, every graffiti-covered underpass.

On top of getting to know my neighborhood of villages, towns and noisy motorways on the fringe of a big city, I wanted to teach myself to slow down more, to notice the seasons changing, and to appreciate all that I did have in my life rather than just grumbling because I don’t live in a log cabin in a forest.

So what did this global traveler discover? Was it a lively and fantastic adventure? Well, no, not really.

Exploring my local map was not a substitute for strapping a tent to the back of a bike and setting off from your front door to pedal a lap of the planet. Nothing is. The writer, disability rights advocate and political activist Helen Keller famously said “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” But on this occasion, I respectfully disagree. The year I spent exploring my backyard was not a daring adventure, but it was an eye-opening experience and one of the most interesting, educational journeys of my life.

I discovered quiet valleys and beautiful woods that I never knew existed, even after all my years of micro-adventures. I found quirky, characterful communities, new paths to go running, and fun backroads to cycle. Above all, I discovered that there was a wild world of nature happening all around me that I had simply never given more than a passing nod to before.

Like a drab little bird called a chiffchaff, just eight grams and very ‘ignorable,’ that I now learned makes the epic journey to my local woods all the way from Africa each year, and whose monotonous “chiff-chaff” call that I have been not noticing all my life is the one which heralds that the glory of spring is on its way. Or learning that what I’d always assumed were dragonflies hovering over summer streams were sometimes actually beautiful demoiselles—shimmering, metallic blue damselflies that I’d never heard of before.

My boring map, and my busy, routine days are made better by these discoveries, and by knowing I share my home with such small wonders. I also learned more about history and culture than ever before, often scurrying home from my forays to dive deep into all sorts of curious internet rabbit holes about what my map had taught me that day.

Amid the satisfaction of finding out more about nature than I ever did in my four-year zoology degree, I also came to care more about the damage we are wreaking on our planet than ever before. 

If you also allow people more access to the land, their mental and physical health will improve, their connection to nature will grow, along with their determination to care for it, and they become more likely to demand changes to repair our damaged land. 

The scale of the climate breakdown and global biodiversity loss can be hard to identify and connect with. But seeing a nearby wood chopped down to build more shops, or learning that England’s green and pleasant land is actually a nature-starved desert of methane-belching, river-polluting industrial agriculture made me take notice and want to take action in a way that government reports or stories of Amazonian deforestation or stranded polar bears had never managed to do.

I live in one of the most wildlife-depleted lands on the planet, where every single river is contaminated with chemicals, in a population that is the most disconnected from nature in all of Europe. The public only has a right to roam on eight percent of England’s land. These were depressing issues for me to confront almost weekly as I explored my map.

But I began to feel hope as I discovered how interconnected all these issues are, and learned that some of the solutions are very simple, though certainly not easy. Changing the way we eat and farm can free up large areas of land for nature regeneration and help rivers to heal. Step back from the land and nature gallops in, filling the landscape with new trees, buzzing insects, and the sound of birdsong. One of my most joyful week’s outings was to a small valley that was being allowed to rewind naturally. I loved seeing birch saplings reclaiming old industrial areas too.

If you also allow people more access to the land, their mental and physical health will improve, their connection to nature will grow, along with their determination to care for it, and they become more likely to demand changes to repair our damaged land. 

Although the journey around my map was more suburbia than Siberian wilderness, I did get a sense of wildness more often that I thought I would, when I first had the idea. I began the project fearing that it would be a worse experience than flying off on another exotic jaunt—a drab compromise.

But that was not the case at all. As the year passed, I grew to appreciate my local area more than ever before, learned so much, and was endlessly fascinated. As poet E.E. Cummings said, “Listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.”

If you are willing to be curious, enthusiastic, and pay attention, a single map could even be enough exploration for an entire lifetime, just as it always was, even in the years when we forgot that.

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Alastair Humphreys’s new book, Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness, is published on 11 January 2024.

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