Getting lost is like forgetting: you only need to do it once. You don’t have to keep forgetting where you left your car keys. Once is enough. You don’t keep getting lost; one wrong turning, in a moment of distraction, is enough.

While taking photographs for a book on the Pennine Way, I walked to the top of Bleaklow, in Derbyshire’s ‘Dark Peak’. Maybe I became disorientated by the peat hags, or the fact that the top of Bleaklow is an extensive, rocky plateau rather than a well-defined summit, so that when I tried to retrace my steps I took the wrong path. Since I always carry on Ordnance Survey, I shouldn’t have made the mistake at all, or, having made it, I should have realised quite quickly that something was amiss. But I misread the landmarks I saw, trying to make them conform to what I saw on the map. Wanting to believe I was on the right path, I reconfigured the landscape to match my preconceptions until, suddenly, the construction of my imaginary landscape fell apart, like a house of cards, and I realised I was lost.

Bleaklow is well-named. During the winter months it can be very bleak indeed. Plenty of walkers have trudged over the top, in wind or rain or snow, and decided that if this is what long distance walking was all about, they’d rather give it a miss. Fortunately, the weather on this day was surprising mild. I was walking through a moorland landscape which, if not quite featureless, was hard to ‘read’. There were no stone walls, no fences, no farms, no barns; I looked ahead, I looked left, I looked right, and saw nothing that seemed familiar. But I had to do something, so I decided to walk in a straight line downhill and see where I ended up. Seeing no other walkers, even on a Saturday, I shared the moorland landscape with skylarks and curlews and a few insouciant sheep which looked up, briefly, and returned to the more important matter of chewing the coarse moorland grass.

Walking was easy, with the peat and heather dry underfoot. The sky was blue, with cumulus clouds stacked up like scatter cushions, and, once I‘d stopped scolding myself for getting lost, I relaxed into the moment and started to enjoy my surroundings. When I came across a small stream, I followed it down into a grassy, steep-sided valley.

I remember the sun being hot on my back; in my memory it was midsummer, but memory plays tricks. Thanks to the miracle that is digital photography, and the way that metadata is ‘welded’ to every image that comes out of my camera, I can be pedantically accurate. It was April 7, 2007. I sat by the stream, watching the clear water bubble over the rocks. I lay down on dry grass, letting the song of the skylark recede as the bird climbed ever higher in the sky. I was still lost.

I closed my eyes and fell asleep.