Derry/Londonderry has a conflicted past but is fiercely loved and celebrated by its inhabitants. In the 21st century, it's shaping a new identity and redefining itself. The success of the hit TV sitcom 'Derry Girls' has breathed new life into the civic vision of the city and its surrounding landscape, shining a global spotlight on a place so often defined only by its troubled history. Marie-Louise Muir is native to the city and has resettled there after years of living away. In this...

Anneka Rice’s favourite place on earth is the Isle of Wight. As an accomplished and enthusiastic painter, its landscape and atmosphere have inspired her art for as long as she can remember. And she’s not alone. On today’s Open Country, Anneka sets out to discover why the island is one of the most creative places in the UK, famous for attracting poets, painters and photographers to its shores. From legendary names such as Tennyson, Keats and Dickens, to modern-day local artists, Anneka...

Helen Mark joins a group of asylum seekers as they help with a tree-planting project in Denbighshire. She hears how - without a car, and with rural buses both scarce and expensive - refugees rarely get access to the countryside. The group of people she meets have travelled to Wales from Liverpool for the day, but come originally from all over the world. She hears about the experiences of four of them - from Iraq, Iran, Namibia and Togo. They spend the day working alongside local conservation...

The rural landscapes of Gloucestershire have inspired many classical composers - including Herbert Howells, Gerald Finzi, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ivor Gurney, to name just a few. In this programme, Rose Ferraby finds out about the links between landscape and music and learns about the extraordinary cluster of composers who were associated with Gloucester Cathedral in the early part of the 20th century. She talks to academics and musicians about how a love of the Gloucestershire countryside...

Sally Rodgers from electronic musical duo ‘A Man Called Adam’ takes us to the Headland of Hartlepool to explore the landscape, culture and history which has inspired her music. As part of Wintertide Festival, the artists of the area have created installations, art and music inspired by their fishing heritage. We hear about the songs of the ‘gutter girls’ – women who gutted herring along the East Coast – which ‘A Man Called Adam’ have reworked into electronic soundscapes, to be played along...

At the major Roman site of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, excavations have unearthed artefacts from nearly two thousand years ago. In this programme, archaeologist Rose Ferraby visits the site and asks what we can learn about the people who lived here and the kind of lives they led. She hears about the five thousand pairs of shoes which were left behind by the departing Romans, from marching boots to baby's bootees, with another 30-40,000 more pairs believed to...

Dan O’Neill is a wildlife expert and biologist. He’s also the first openly gay wildlife presenter. In this Open Country he’s in London to discover what ‘rewilding’ means for the capital. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, launched the ‘Rewild London Fund’ to help make London a leader in urban rewilding, from restoring rivers to reintroducing species currently absent from the capital. One of them is the beaver and at Paradise Fields in Ealing, just down the road from the busy Greenford tube...

The Highland Boundary Fault runs diagonally across Scotland, dividing the Highlands from the Lowlands. In this programme, Helen Mark finds out what impacts this geological feature has had on the landscape around it. She visits Comrie, which at one time had more earth tremors than anywhere else in the UK, earning it the nickname "Shaky Toun". On a tour of the Earthquake House - one of the smallest listed buildings in Europe and the first purpose-built seismological monitoring station in the...

Anna Jones paddleboards the rocky coastline of Pembrokeshire, listening to the mysterious growling sounds of the sea caves. As the tide rises, water sloshes into holes in the rock and squeezes out puffs of air - or could it, maybe, be a dragon? Paddling in and out of the caves and coves, Anna and local instructor Libby Chivers allow their imaginations to run wild, picturing dragons and sea monsters deep in the darkness. It's easy to get carried away - literally - on an inflatable...

The mountain rescue team in Wasdale in the Lake District have recorded their busiest year so far with some of the harshest winter months still to come. The Langdale Ambleside team have also already reached their average annual incident rate - two months before the end of the year. Across the peaks of the UK, Mountain Rescue teams are coming under increasing pressure as visitor numbers soar. Helen Mark meets members of the Wasdale Mountain Rescue team and the Langdale Ambleside team in the...

Mountain Rescue teams are under pressure. Helen Mark visits the Lake District to hear why.

At Carbeth, just north of Glasgow, there are around 170 simple wooden huts tucked into an area of woodland. Basic and off-grid, they are part of Scotland's hutting tradition. Carbeth is the biggest hutting site in the country, with a history that goes back to the end of the First World War, when the landowner gave permission for people to camp and later to build simple dwellings, as interest in nature and the great outdoors grew. Since then, hutting has gone through peaks and troughs of...

Carolyn Quinn has family links to Felixstowe, a place she’s visited frequently over the years, enjoying walks along the Edwardian seafront, soaking up its old world charm. For Open Country she returns to take a closer look at this Suffolk town, including how it’s been shaped by the enormous presence of Felixstowe Port, the largest container port in the UK. She begins her journey with David Gledhill at Felixstowe Museum who gives a quick overview of the richly historic area. From there she...

Paul Evans explores the rich folklore and natural history of St Melangell church near Llangynog in Powys for a new piece of nature writing. Paul is one of our finest nature writers and in this episode of Open Country he talks us through his creative process, which he describes as "a kind of imaginative hunter-gathering”. Inspired by the ancient yew trees that grow in the churchyard, he listens to their stories, such as the science behind their great age and the legend of Saint Melangell, a...

As a child, Mary McKeown played hide and seek amongst the Beaghmore Stone Circles in her native County Tyrone. It's a mysterious, mystical site with seven circles, ten rows of stones and twelve cairns, all seemingly carefully aligned. They were found by turf cutters in the 1930s, excavated in the 1960s and carbon dated back to the early Bronze Age. There are many theories about what they were used for - perhaps a burial site, a place for harvest ceremonies, or some sort of lunar or solar...

Mary-Ann Ochota joins a group of walkers, riders and horses as in the Scottish Highlands as they follow St Columba’s Way, a pilgrim route from St Andrew’s to Iona. Starting at the village of Killin, eleven people and four horses – Istia, Kirsty, Moy and Sasha - follow the old ways through Glen Lochay and Glen Lyon to the Bridge of Orchy. It's a trip organised by The Big Hoof, a group which promotes adventure and wellbeing through long journeys travelling with horses, on both new routes and...

The landscape of Dungeness, at the south-eastern tip of England, is an unusual one. In this programme, Helen Mark finds out about stories surrounding sound and light on this peninsula which juts out into the English Channel. She visits the huge concrete "sound mirrors" - built in the 1920s as an early detection system for incoming enemy planes. Their technology became obsolete as aircraft speeds increased and radar was invented. They still stand today, but are now part of a nature reserve....

"They rise up suddenly out of fields, they're next to roads and they're even in the middle of the town golf course." Oban resident Antonia Quirke is intrigued by the strange cliffs that can be found everywhere along this stretch of Scottish coast, and she becomes more obsessed when she finds out that someone has been banging in titanium bolts to create new climbing routes up to their peaks. Joining her at the Dog Stone is the geologist James Westland who begins to unpick the history of...

Thousands of years ago, large parts of Britain were covered with temperate rainforest - also known as "Atlantic woodland" or "Celtic rainforest". It's a habitat which needs high rainfall and low annual variation in temperature, so the western fringes of the British Isles provide perfect conditions. But temperate rainforest has been largely destroyed over the centuries and there are now only fragments of it left. One of the few surviving areas is in the Isle of Man, where work now is underway...

The town of Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast has long been associated with fossils. In this programme, Rose Ferraby finds out about new geological research which sheds light on changes to the marine landscape of thousands of years ago - and asks whether it has lessons to teach us for the future. She meets a geologist and a marine biologist who tell her about the latest research, and talks to an expert on Whitby jet to find out how this unique type of fossil has become so linked with the...

"When I was a kid, a little junior baby map addict, it always worried me enormously - Flintshire (detached). Why is it detached? What's wrong with it?" Mike Parker is obsessed by an area of Flintshire called the Maelor. On the map he says it looks like a calloused big toe sticking into the plump ribs of England. Situated slightly south of a line between Wrexham and Whitchurch, it follows few of the expected border rules. And to prove his point, he's taking Miles Warde on a tour, from the...

It's a land of standing stones, burial cairns and circles in the fields - Glen Lonan beside Loch Nell. Lupi Moll and Ivan Nicholson, who've known the area all their lives, take Oban resident Antonia Quirke on a short trek through the glen to see if they can work out why there are so monuments here. It was once part of the road of the kings, an ancient coffin route. It also includes a more recent memorial, a stone eye that marks the resting place of Lupi's wife, who died twelve years ago. The...

Dougie Vipond visits the River Tay, which runs from its source in the Highlands, past Dundee and out to sea. For centuries, the Tay estuary has shaped how creative people have expressed themselves. Starting at McDuff's Cross, the author Robin Crawford explains the Tay's link to Shakespeare - who was said to have drawn inspiration for his play Macbeth from this area. Pre-Raphaelite painters Turner and Millais knew the area well, Beatrix Potter imagined some of her most famous creations on the...

Helen Mark visits Coleshill in Oxfordshire to learn about its wartime secrets. In 1940, with fear growing that Britain could be invaded by the German army, the estate became the training headquarters for a secret underground army. Over the next four years, thousands of country men - such as farmers, gamekeepers and foresters - were trained in underground resistance. They lived outwardly ordinary lives, but their job was to spring into action in the event of invasion, disappearing into bunkers...

The landscape of south Wales has been shaped and defined by coal. In this programme, Helen Mark explores the Rhondda valley – finding out about is history and asking what its future may look like, now the heavy industry has gone. She visits a disused railway tunnel which once carried coal from the mines to the port of Swansea, but which has been closed and sealed off for decades. Now a group of enthusiasts is campaigning to re-open the tunnel as a tourist attraction. They have ambitions plans...