The hike which, thankfully, went wrong | Jack Marshall's column

Basically, our weather is fairly milquetoast in the grand meteorological scheme of things.

Five days without clouds prompts a near-universal spate of eager thermometer graphics on the front of newspapers across the land and the very best encapsulation of our climate comes from a local news site in the South West. Headline: ‘Boring and completely unremarkable weather returns’.

All this is, naturally, a wordy preamble to the story of how recently I got lost on a hike and had to walk through some really, really deep snow against a backdrop so bleach-white it was like being inside a ping-pong ball.

It was very unusual and all the more wonderful for it.

It was supposed to be a lovely hike up a hill and round a reservoir. The day before, light flurries of snow singing on the wind had gently coated the wheelie-bins, barely settling as slurry on the roads. Overnight, the temperature plummeted; in the morning, the trees were frozen limbs of ice, the air was scalpel-cold, and the fields were canvas-white. The sun was out.

Myself and my brother set off, jokily noting that we were walking towards the only foreboding cloud in the sky. Haha.

An hour later, the wind whipping around us and any semblance of a path long eradicated, we stood at the hill’s trig point. We started guessing the right way down.

We took the wrong one, ended up wading through snow up to our waists, and accidentally crossed two frozen streams - the first without noticing and the second with noticing after my left foot all of a sudden got very wet indeed.

Rather quickly, we appreciated how people can get properly lost, even a few miles away from the car.

We saw grouse and followed their calls before catching the sound of traffic and finding the road. Kicking the caked layers of frost off our trousers and boots, we commented on how alien the feeling of physically moving though that much snow was.

We’d literally never seen so much of the stuff; it was like being in a video game. It was thrilling and bizarre and eerie and brilliant.

Fundamentally, we got lost on a walk and accidentally crossed a bit of the moors that wasn’t a path. But it was strangely unforgettable.