When I was seven years old, I asked my dad if I could dig a deep hole in the middle of our back garden. We lived in a semi-detached house on a modern housing estate that formed part of the network of suburbs that spread like fungus across Britain during the post-war housing and population booms, so the garden was not particularly big. A sudden large hole would be significant.

When my dad asked why, I remember being struck by the absurdity of my answer: I wanted to climb into the hole and spend a long time in it, with the worms, investigating what went on down there, beneath our feet. I never dug the hole, but in the intervening years, I have come to believe that to experience nature, we must do more than bear witness. To see it from a passing train window is not always enough and sometimes you have to walk in it or through it, or climb down into it. Full immersion. To be where the worms are, or to become rain-soaked an hour from home, or climb a tree, or swim a river, is to gain a different perspective.

I live in a valley in West Yorkshire that might be what the French would describe as jolie laide, which literally means “pretty and ugly”. The term can be applied to people (or places) that are eye-catching, imperfect, flawed. Beautiful, yes, but unconventionally so. The weather is harsh in the valley, the rainfall prodigious. It is a landscape sculpted by glaciers but scarred by industry and therefore more brutal in appearance than the rolling country of the more aesthetically agreeable North Yorkshire Dales.

In the valley, the remains of past human endeavours poke through the soil or are slowly being consumed and reclaimed by the nettles and Himalayan balsam, the imported weed with seed heads that ingeniously pop when touched, and which grows uncontrollably in the warmer months. Abandoned mills, broken waterwheels and rusted machinery all sit in the boggy sod, and the hills are sectioned off by ancient drystone walls – built by men who howled at the moon and didn’t understand science – that have stood for centuries, supported only by their own weight. The land shares its stories and all these things form a narrative. As a writer, such details are irresistible, but even if I didn’t write, I would still walk the woods and moors, the hills and the quarries. Because each morning nature offers a new daily drama.

The Pennine Moors that surround my valley can be treacherous. Sometimes they can only be navigated by the stone paths that find a way through. Slick underfoot, the stones have been sliced sideways and laid across the land by hands that gripped simple stout mallets and sharpened chisels; hands now turned to bone dust by time. The rough blocks of stone are like pages from a torn book thrown to the wind. Now they make a path and the path pushes through, climbing up through the old woods and onto the moor. Here, the world becomes widescreen and though the day is often dull it is never unremarkable. The bog tries to suck the stones under as I walk over them and notice the dripping mosses and the blank eyes of the sheep that stop and stare mid-chew. There are signposts and markers up on the moor that make a map from history, while far below in the valley the old empty mills sit: glass-smashed, graffiti-strewn, soon to be forgotten forever. Nature is pulling everything apart and I like it.

There are mineshafts and quarries up on the moor, too, and rockfalls and landslides where the soil has slipped away to reveal a chasm in which I like to imagine the voices of our ancestors echo, an entire choir of them whispering up from the dense and cloying earth, their souls now a part of this purple-heathered plain. They are trapped by time. The whispers become bellows and the bellows become a chant and the chant propels me onwards beneath clouds that speed like grainy film footage projected at double speed onto the threadbare screen of the sullen sky.

In my writing, place is always a character. In fact, it is often the lead character. It is, though, a mistake to personify landscapes and ascribe to them character traits and personalities; only humans, with our arrogance and solipsistic worldview, would do such a thing, and I have to resist the urge to do so. Instead my enjoyment of the British landscape comes from its indifference. It is simply there, in all its varying glories – the stage upon which stories unravel.

Yet even so, nature does not exist independently. We are part of it and it is part of us. We are nature, though in recent centuries an ecological imbalance has emerged, one with consequences that appear increasingly dire. More than anything, our reaction to the climate emergency will be what defines us as a global society for the centuries to come.

If silence has long been considered golden, imagine how valuable a commodity it will be in this unknown future. Solitude, too, for although this can be experienced or achieved in the town or the city – and a densely populated city can be far lonelier than a barren stretch of moorland during a vicious storm – true silence is best pursued in our more remote corners. Even then, nature and the elements conspire in such places to compose a soundtrack of their own. A shrieking raptor circling overhead, the breeze rattling the dry glass like a drawer full of knives, the snort and low bellow of a beast unseen: these all serve to remind an individual of their insignificance, their impermanence and their place in the order of things. Perhaps if enough of these moments of individual reflection are experienced, they will be enough to save the planet. Then the silence we seek will truly be worth more than a mountain of gold.

Every autumn, I find myself heading north, escaping the valley and chasing the light, up into the Scottish Borders. I have a friend who owns a small cottage in a small village there, who generously lets writers, artists and various reprobates squat in it for great stretches.

The house was bought by my friend and her late husband, a writer. It sits in the Lammermuir Hills, a lesser-visited area of grazing sheep and hunting country.

For the past seven years, it has been my ritual to retreat there to work, observe the changing seasons and immerse myself in the type of isolation one experiences when there are no shops, pubs or public transport, and very few people for miles around. Such solitude in nature can be unnerving and unsettling. But it can be ecstatic, too.

Even here, where I can go days without conversing with another human and see more hares sitting on their haunches and sniffing the air than I do people, man’s impact on the landscape is evident. You don’t see many ruddy-cheeked walkers, but you do hear the distant crack of gunshot as overfed grouse take flight during shoots organised by the wealthy landowners on moors maintained by small teams of gamekeepers. In these moments, my emotions are mixed; hunting with weapons feels morally wrong, yet I know it brings investment and keeps these spaces semi-wild and uncolonised. No one ever said nature was benevolent. It is a moral maze to be navigated with tact and consideration.

Typing these words, I’m aware that my own enjoyment of nature and the countryside sounds like the words of the privileged. Though I am not at all wealthy, I do have the time in which to explore the landscapes that surround me, and did so even when living in London. Others might counter that they have jobs and families, responsibilities that do not allow the time for such an indulgence, but it shouldn’t be this way. For thousands of years, we lived as part of nature and with wildness within us. So, what went wrong? By the 21st century, a combination of mechanisation, medicine and technological advancements were meant to ensure that we would each live longer and have a surplus of leisure time. While the former is true, the latter is very much not as we find ourselves working all hours and feeling more stressed, anxious and depressed than ever.

I believe nature – dramatic, indifferent and occasionally hostile nature – provides solutions to these very modern problems. While the idea of it as a cure-all is a naïve and idealistic outlook in a complex world, it does continue to teach us lessons. In Britain, we are lucky as we are never far from wildlife. Even seeing plucky weeds push through the cracked paving stones can turn a bad day into a good one. To know where we are going, we must remember where we came from.

Mr Benjamin Myers is an award-winning author and journalist. His novels include The Offing, The Gallows Pole and Beastings, and the non-fiction work Under The Rock. His new book Male Tears, a collection of short stories, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2021