The best wintery British walks

TS Eliot was just being provoking. The cruellest month is February, and everyone knows it. Christmas is long forgotten, spring still seems years away, and you're cooped up in the house for weekends on end, breaking your new year's resolutions and perfecting your scowl.

Psychologically, how do you survive? You try to insulate yourself from it. You turn up the heating, eat more puddings, hurry from duvet to desk and back, through monochrome streets under concrete-coloured clouds, wishing the greys away.

I've got a better strategy, and it's far more fulfilling. Embrace the winter. Reconnect with the elements. Hug the cold. One of the pleasures of living in Britain is that we have seasons, extremes of temperature and colour and light - but only if you expose your senses to them.

Here's where. Four fiercely beautiful places that won't just invigorate your mind and body, they will scour your soul. These are landscapes that look their best when the weather is grisly, because that's the weather that shaped them: stormy mountains, squelching moorlands, snarling shores. Epic spaces where you can stand on a hilltop, soaked through with rain, and give it the full King Lear, howling at the blizzard until your lungs hurt - then retreat to a nearby fireside to fill your belly and toast your toes.

They may not be wildernesses on a Siberian scale, but they have more than enough wild scenery to fill a wilderness weekend. How about a life-affirming winter escape?

DARTMOOR

Travel should be full of surprises, but there are some destinations that you prefer to conform to stereotype. Dartmoor can be relied upon. On my last winter visit, I arrived to find thick white fog squatting on the road like a wet toad. There were wild miles of savagely inspiring scenery on every side, and I knew it; but my car was imprisoned in a padded cell. Talk about eerie.

Suddenly, the sun cracked the cloud and I glimpsed a hunchbacked figure out on the moor, frozen motionless while his skinnier comrade sank writhing into the ooze. Horrible - but it was just the sphinx-like silhouette of Vixen Tor, and a stunted blackthorn tree. Just Dartmoor, in other words, being Dartmoor again.

Don't be fooled into thinking the moor is empty in winter, though. There are the cairns and crosses and strange bouldery boundary lines scattered all over it by Neolithic man. There's the prison in the middle, encased in a weird dome of light like some kind of infernal Oz. Most of all there is the melodramatic wind, doing its best impression of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and raising the ghost of Mad Axeman Mitchell, who escaped across Baggator in December 1966, never to be recaptured. Time to go indoors...

Brave the blast: for a quick burst of trademark Dartmoor wilderness, head for Princetown, where Dartmoor Prison (01822 892130, www.dartmoor-prison.co.uk) now tempts non-felonious visitors with its "black museum and picnic area". Take the track behind the Plume of Feathers out to tumbledown South Hessary Tor (OS Explorer map 28), and scramble up for vast views of rippling peat, crippled granite and sky.

A couple of miles more brings you to Nuns Cross, largest of the enigmatic waymarks planted on the moor by long-lost monks. Mind your step here: to the east stretches Foxtor Mires, inspiration for Conan Doyle's murderous Grimpen, and still known as the "Dartmoor Stables", such are the livestock that have been slurped beneath. Hurry back to the pub, order a pint of Jail Ale and sink into a fog all your own.

Thaw out: 18th-century Prince Hall Hotel (01822 890403, www.princehallhotel.co.uk), slap in the middle of the moor at Two Bridges, has comfort food, comfortable rooms and cottagey decor. Doubles with slap-up dinner from £220.

If you are visiting between April and September, try Lydgate House (01822 880209, www.lydgatehouse.co.uk) is set in its own 36 acres of gorsy hinterland just outside Postbridge - about as remote as Dartmoor villages get. Inside, though, is a picture of restfulness: a log-burning stove in the lounge, goose-down duvets upstairs, and a lively house-party feel, lubricated by Peter and Cindy Farrington's double-rosette dinners. Doubles start from £55pp, B&B; three-course dinner £28.50pp.

THE ELAN VALLEY

Wordsworth had the Lake District, Coleridge the Mendip Hills, Constable the River Stour. Percy Bysshe Shelley had the Elan Valley - and it's perfect for him: wild-haired, mad-eyed and melancholy. It lies far, far away in the sheepy nowhereland otherwise known as mid-Wales, and when the 19-year-old poet first visited, he was so enraptured, he wanted to stay for good.

"We are now embosomed in the solitude of mountains, woods and rivers," Shelley wrote, "...mountains and rocks seeming to form a barrier round this quiet valley, which the tumult of the world may never overleap".

It still feels like that today, especially in winter, when you drive west from the town of Rhayader for endless miles across peaty plateaus decked in pre-Raphaelite colours. No light pollution, no wind farms, scarcely any farms at all.

There has been one monumental change since Shelley's day, of course. In the 1890s, the valley was flooded to collect water for the city of Birmingham, creating five big Brummie bathtubs - the Elan Valley reservoirs. The poet's house, Nantgwyllt, was drowned as surely as he was. But a century later, the Victorian dams and viaducts have blurred into the beauty of their background and they only serve to ornament the wilderness. When snow flecks the hills and the water is inky, "the Lakeland of Wales" looks more Romantic than ever.

Brave the blast: the valley's waterside walks are easy. The path from Llanerchi car park, for example, beside the Garreg-ddu viaduct (OS Explorer map 147), shadows the western shore of the reservoir to pass among the abandoned gardens of Cwm Elan, where Shelley stayed in 1811 while writing Queen Mab. For maximum escapism, though, drive the drovers' road northwest from Rhayader across the slatey roof of the Cambrian hills. It leads eventually to Devil's Bridge - actually three bridges stacked across a wooded chasm, with a spuming 300ft waterfall below.

Thaw out: nothing could be more civilised after a yomp across the hills than retiring to The Drawing Room (01982 552493, www.the-drawing-room.co.uk), Colin and Melanie Dawson's rave-reviewed new restaurant-with-rooms at Newbridge-on-Wye.

The Dawsons have taken an 18th-century house - part of which was once used as a drawing office by the architects of the Elan Valley reservoirs - and engineered a stylish 21st-century bolt hole, mixing comfy furniture with bold colours. Colin's fillet of Welsh black beef with madeira, wild mushrooms and shallots might make your winter. Doubles cost from £190 for dinner, B&B.

THE FOREST OF BOWLAND

There is a phone box in the hamlet of Dunsop Bridge, where, in April 1992, Britain's greatest professional loner decided it's good to talk. It seems that even Sir Ranulph Fiennes, conqueror of the Antarctic, felt a tiny bit lonesome in the Forest of Bowland.

The phone box (opened by Sir Ran and complete with commemorative inscription) marks the cartographical centre of Britain - and a wayward, Heathcliffian heart it is too. Ignored by the coach parties charging north on the M6 towards the Lake District, Bowland stretches emptily across 300 square miles of soft heathery summits and boisterous becks. It is a forest in the medieval sense only: you could walk for hours before clapping eyes on a tree. Even longer before you find a human being.

Historically, this has been a land for wellingtons rather than walking boots, stalked by gamekeepers in the pay of the Duke of Westminster. But the desolation of the fells is offset by captivating villages that would grace the most delectable Yorkshire dale. There is Newton, Chipping and, best of all, Slaidburn, with an inn, a tearoom and a few lanes of caramel-coloured cottages seemingly hacked straight out of the moors. I was last there in the smudgy sunshine of a winter afternoon, with everything shuttered against the cold and marsh smells eddying through the streets. Vaguely malevolent, but magic.

Brave the blast: for full-bore Bowland wildness, you need to leave behind Dunsop Bridge, with its snooker-table village green and duck stream, and drive northwest into the moorland cleavage known as the Trough of Bowland. A footpath on the right (OS Explorer map 102) leads beside Rams Clough to the summit of Whin Fell, where nothing dents the silence - unless it's a grouse, exploding from underneath your feet.

A gentler alternative, right from the door of the forest's best inn, takes you across the River Hodder at Whitewell and southwest along the valley flank to the Bowland Wild Boar Park (01995 61554, www.wildboarpark.co.uk).

Thaw out: a long-time Sunday Times favourite, the Inn at Whitewell (01200 448222) has been Bowland's top bolt hole since the 1400s, when it was the lodge and courthouse of the royal foresters. Some find it scruffy round the edges, but we reckon that only adds to its toasty allure.

The inn has its own wine merchant and art gallery, but doesn't mind a bit if you march in off the moor looking windswept. A double room with its own peat fire costs from £125, B&B.


ROMNEY MARSHES

In England, the term "wilderness" is bound to be relative, but here is an authentic one not far from London - 40 square miles of dead-flat vacancy with little to fill it but marsh grass, shingle and sky. Actually, that's not true. Romney Marshes are strewn with odd technological flotsam: a robot army of marching power pylons; a strange shrunken railway one-third normal size; and a fisherman's hut clad entirely in rubber. Not to mention Dungeness nuclear power station, brooding on the beach. Many British seasides have end-of-the-pier shows; Romney feels more like the end of the world.

Nowhere in southeast England touches this for outlandishness, nor for stress-nuking solitude. If you're the kind of person who prefers Munch to Monet, you'll love it. A winter walk along the pebble-piled peninsula to Dungeness is like dunking your spirit in bicarbonate of soda.

One person who came to meditate here was the avant-garde gardener and auteur Derek Jarman, and an unlikely artists' colony has grown up in the straggle of fishing shacks around Prospect Cottage, his plank-built former home. Jarman's final film, Blue, comprised 77 solid minutes of luminous blankness - it may well have been inspired by the uneventful view from his windows.

When you've had your fill of unearthliness, you can repair to one of the area's snug, sequestered pubs - the Woolpack at Brookland or the Red Lion at Snargate.

Brave the blast: birds are drawn to the ethereal bleakness of Romney, making the RSPB's reserve at Dungeness one of Britain's best winter wildfowl sites. Thousands of greylag geese, Bewick's swans, lapwings and golden plovers set up their seasonal roost in the pooled and pitted hinterland between the power station and Denge Marsh. There are two miles of nature trails and five hides. You can crunch there on foot across the irrepressible shingle from the terminus of the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway (01797 362353, www.rhdr.org.uk), the world's diddiest passenger line - take OS Explorer map 189.

Thaw out: Romney Bay House (01797 364747) is just the kind of hotel you hope to discover in a place like this: out-of-the-way, eccentric-looking, but consummately cosy. Designed by Clough Williams-Ellis, our greatest architectural loon, and set on a fizzling-out shore road beside St Mary's Bay, it's got elegant bedrooms flooded with sea light, and scintillating seafood cooked by chef-patron Clinton Lovell. Sea-view doubles from £95; four-course dinner £37.50pp.