For her memoir A Flat Place, Noreen Masud travelled around some of Britain’s flattest landscapes — Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Morecambe Bay, Orkney, Newcastle Moor. In a lovely piece for The Guardian published online yesterday, she summed up what they mean to her:
“Go to any beach when the tide is out, and you get a taste of their magnificence. You don’t need golden sands: mud will do perfectly. The point is to find that ruler-straight line of the horizon, cut with such confidence and swagger against the big sky. When I gaze at a flat space, a weight falls from me and energy rises up through my body. I feel utterly free in body and mind; I want to run and yell and cartwheel.”