These moors, in the Pennines near Oldham, seem wild and untamed.
However, human activities such as shooting, farming and walking, have changed them massively. The original forests have long gone and the moors have been drained, overgrazed and regularly burnt. Even so, wildness is forever trying to take over again.

The moors, like all land in Britain, can never be free of human visitors. People love its wide-open spaces, endless skyline and solitude. How can we balance our own needs with those of more delicate moorland species who may need undisturbed privacy to thrive?

The moors have always been a hard wild place in my mind - But my friend Bruce, he says, the moors are not so wild, that they've been changed, by people, for the purposes of farming, for hunting, and the forests that once covered these moors have all been chopped down, and the land has been drained and overgrazed, and burnt.

Well, tonight, for reasons we need not go into, I need to be in a wild, hard place, a cold, cold place, somewhere wilder and harder and colder than the world beneath my skin, so I decide to check out the moors.

Midnight on the moor land deep mid-winter. On a lonely moor land road… I open the car door and step out into the night into the sudden energy of the cold, and the cold bites through my winter clothes and sinks its teeth into my bones and it's bitterly cold, too cold for the old woman to be out plucking her geese but Jack Frost is out and about and leaving his mark all around.

And it's deeply dark in this dead of night, witching time, pitchy darkness, darksome, sombre moor land place, except, it isn't, well, it is, but then my eyes become adjusted and I realise I can see things in this darkness, I mean you don't get dark like this in the city of lights, but then again you can't see the stars like you can from these moor tops, numberless, myriad, beautiful stars, and the moon so melancholy and bright. And there are colours in the night: the black raven wing moors; violet, amethyst, aubergine in the sky; the greenery and browns of olivine, ochre, moss, aquamarine, burnt umber, jade, cinnamon, copper in the earth and the grass and the peat bogs, and the blues are everywhere, in the sky, the air, the earth, in my heart, my guts, my head; these midnight, moor land blues are everywhere.

And there isn't the hullabaloo of the city out here but it's far from a silent night, It's like standing on the set of some horror movie landscape What with the haunting screeching of the owls, and the red grouse laughing like its soul has been stolen, and the sad mournful cry of the curlew is like I don't know what, but it's the weird, wailing scream of a vixen that really, really freaks me out and turns my blood to ice, It's so cold, it's the reality of cold, cold reality and it's colder than the cold on T.V. midnight on the moor land deep mid-winter just exactly what I needed My friend Bruce, he says the moors are not so wild, they feel pretty wild to me, but Bruce, he also says, that Mother Nature in all her wonderful biodiversity will be forever trying to take over again.

Now there's a discovery that's worth constantly re-making: Try as you might, you just can't keep a Good Woman down!