"We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places—retreated to most often when we are most remote from them—are among the most important landscapes we possess. Adam Nicolson has written of the ‘powerful absence[s]’ that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. [These] landscapes, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can 'enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’."

— Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot