In a rambling response, I listed off not just one place but many. I love the Minnowburn trail verging the River Lagan. It’s a walk that I became familiar with during lockdown, and what I particularly enjoy is the variety of landscape on the walk. Treading the well-worn path that winds around the flowing river. Passing through the cheerful village of Edenderry with its colourful doors and bright red post box. Crossing through fields with muted, gentle hills and descending from the historic Giants Ring.

I have happy memories of trailing through blankets of wild garlic in the earthy woodland at the back of Glenbank Park, tucked into the Ligoniel Road. A sea of vibrant green leaves, the air heavy with a punchy garlicky aroma. I also love wandering through the Ligoniel Dams, especially at the heart of summer, with dragonflies and damselflies darting and hovering by the water’s edge under an intense heat.

Then there are the dramatic cliff walks along the North Coast, with weathered rocks, sea spray and an endless expanse of ocean. And of course, Newcastle, boasting both mountains and sea. I used to associate the Mournes with memories of struggle, of relentless, rocky peaks that I climbed as a reluctant teenager as part of the Duke of Edinburgh exhibition. Fortunately, in more recent years, I’ve come to appreciate the stretch of still mountain range and hardy shrubs, with crispy air that thins as you ascend.

I also have fond memories of hiking on Achill Island, of camping in the Wicklow Mountains, of swimming at Seapoint under the sun’s warm glow — and I could go on. But instead, I’ll ask you the same question. What is your favourite nature space? More interesting still is: what does this place represent for you?

As I spoke, and even as I write now, I am reminded of the fact that it is not just the vivid beauty of these places, that they offer vantage points to pause and absorb the natural world, but it’s also about the memories and the connections that they represent. Long, uninterrupted conversations with friends. Feelings of connection during lockdown. Warm childhood memories. These spaces are living canvases, where we can project the powerful emotions that we feel and hold, and from which nature paints vibrant memories.

To provide some context, I was asked this question about my favourite nature space on a recording of the Solastalgia podcast. Solastalgia describes the emotional impact of witnessing the degradation of our natural surroundings. It’s like nostalgia, but much deeper and maybe darker. It’s a melancholy, almost a mourning, for the negative changes to our environment brought about by climate change and human activity. The Solastalgia podcast, hosted by Dr Sue-Ann Harding and Colin Shaw, is an archive of conversations with ordinary people living in Belfast, who, stirred by emotion, have become activists, fighting for environmental protection and conservation. Sue-Ann and Colin call these people (themselves included) “accidental environmentalists”: ordinary people who effectively “fall into” environmental action after witnessing the degradation or destruction of patches of nature where they live.

In the podcast, Colin and Sue-Ann speak to 10-year-old Mollie Rose after her favourite part of her walk to school was fed into a woodchipper in January 2022. Without proper consultation or an Environmental Impact Assessment, an avenue of mature sycamore trees was felled along the Lagan towpath. A millennium of tree-growth erased, leaving behind short stumps and grey tarmac.

Sue-Ann and Colin also speak to Doris Noe and Chris Murphy, who fought for years against the building of a dual carriageway through wetlands between the freshwater lakes of Lough Neagh and Lough Beg. The loughs and surrounding lands formed wildlife habitats of international environmental significance for species, including whooper swans which fed on the lush grass from October to April. Despite strong public protest and overwhelming scientific evidence for the need to protect these wetland habitats, alternative routes were rejected and four miles of new dual carriageway was built.

Woven into their conversations with Mollie Rose, Doris, Chris and others is this central theme of Solastalgia. The heavy emotion, and sometimes distress, when a place you know and love is undergoing negative change. It’s an emotion also threaded into many of the conversations that I’ve been having with fishers and farmers throughout the past year, including a fisherman at the River Moy in Mayo. No fish arrived in the Spring and the river had to close during summer after the water temperature reached levels similar to indoor swimming pools.

The two of us gazing at this lifeless liquid domain, the fisherman told me about the river as he knew it growing up. He described a symphony of splashes and scales, with salmon playfully leaping out of the river in acrobatic bursts. I felt a bit sad. I’ve never been treated to such a playful display of liquid tails, and I don’t suppose I ever will.

I also heard from a farmer reflecting on his experience growing up in rural Co Down. He described rolling fields of corn, opening and closing drills for potatoes, lifting hay bales, drinking water from the well, growing and gathering potatoes and vegetables at home. He described the move towards factory farming and a market-driven economy, and some of the skills and community that were lost as part of that. “Labour intensive jobs required people coming together,” he said. “Laborious? Joyous? It was both.”

Thinking about your favourite place is a bit of visualisation exercise, and it can be sad thinking about the disregard for our fragile world, especially the ways that nature has been changed sometimes irreversibly. In fact, it would be difficult not to have a strong emotional reaction to that destruction of habitat. But as the Solastalgia podcast suggests, there are glimmers of hope in the extraordinary efforts of ordinary people, in the ways of trees and in the shelter of hedgerows.

We’re drifting further from the land, but memory, story and song can heal us and connect us back. Memories to create a vision. Memories to draw upon, to draw us in and to stay with us, always.

Follow Rosalind on X @rosalindskillen