32the mind was a landscape of a kind and walking a means of crossing it.

He liked tennis, billiards, propellers, winter, the shadowlessness of sea light, northerliness, ceramic, boxwood, crystal and ice.

Cilek proposed a series of what he called ‘pilgrim rules’. Of these, the two most memorable were the ‘Rule of Resonance’: ‘A smaller place with which we resonate is more important than a place of great pilgrimage’; and the ‘Rule of Correspondence’: ‘A place within a landscape corresponds to a place within the heart.’

For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?