My date, however, felt his gravadlax was bland and needed a sauce. Next I tucked into warm aubergine gateau with sweet and sour mushrooms: fine, but too rich for what was effectively a second starter. My date felt similarly about lobster and langoustine soup with morels and spaghetti "Too many morels," he complained throatily. "Can we book a room?"At that we thought we'd better dance, and discovered that once the band had you up, the numbers ran into each other, so it was impossible to stop. "The nearest I've come to perpetual motion," murmured my companion.We dragged ourselves back for the main course: an excellent fillet of beef in bread and herb pastry, though the vegetables - dauphinois potatoes, sugar snap peas - were deemed too rich My red mullet was really not worth breaking off a dance for. The fancy arrangement in a circle with celeriac and lobster did not make up for the mullet's lack of lightness and moisture and we couldn't wait to return to perpetual motion, eventually having to be summoned by the waiter for raspberry souffle.Having once had a traumatic experience with a raspberry souffle myself - far from sinking, it seemed to grow and multiply like a space monster so that everywhere I looked in the flat for days there was more and more raspberry souffle lurking - I was sympathetic about the fact that this one had sunk in the middle and had to be disguised with a blob of ice- cream, particularly as it was my fault for losing all track of time.

The texture and taste was superb: and they had managed to keep it all in the dish, without letting it get out into other parts of the dining room. As if five courses (counting the pea soup) were not enough, we were presented with a miniature coffee cup of chocolate mousse and a plate of petits fours.Dinner, dancing, water and wine came to pounds 127, including coffee and service. Though the food was not our favourite kind, and we would have preferred more consistent expert execution and less fancy fussiness, the gorgeous environment and glittering atmosphere were out of this world. For a romantic evening out with a gentleman friend, a girl could do no finer - unless at the Ritz in Paris ... ed? !. The Beacon would be a bleak place to start a journey, were it not for the half-dozen men who seem to live up there. This modest 300ft lump of chalk rising from the Aylesbury Plain in Buckinghamshire is to model gliders what the Solent is to yachts. As they stand silently pointing their super-long remote control aerials up into the clouds, they look like sea fishermen blissfully unaware of the aeons that have passed since the last tide lapped across this landscape.

The gossamer-thin balsa-and- dope gliders swoop and loop in the infallible updrafts high over the heads of their earthbound pilots. The men were too busy to notice us as I turned Molly on to the Ridgeway Path to Avebury in Wiltshire - the best part of 100 miles away She and I have covered thousands of miles together On short trips like this, I ride. On long ones, where we have to take more gear, then I walk and she carries a pack saddle. Last year she pulled a 22-tonne canal boat from Liverpool to London. The coming four days on the Ridgeway are a holiday - for both of us. Within minutes of leaving the Beacon, we are deep in the glories of Ashridge Forest There is no woodland tree to match the beech. Massive smooth trunks draw the eye up to the cathedral-high leaf canopy which filters and dapples the sunlight with a subtlety unmatched by any stained-glass window. If I were a believer, then it is here that I would expect to feel the presence of God.

The traditional English oak wood is a tortured, stumpy tangled mess compared to the beech groves of the Chilterns.But British beech woods are no more natural than the buildings they echo. The beeches were planted as a crop - just like the depressing ranks of spruce that splodge their ugly way across upland Britain, or the horizon- wide cornfields of the environmental deserts of East Anglia. Beech burns with a fierce, spark-free flame and makes first-class charcoal These woods were once the oil fields of England. They provided fuel for kitchens, iron works and gunpowder factories.Signs of ancient management practices can still be seen in the occasional over-mature pollarded beech tree. They were lovingly decapitated at eight feet above ground level so that the re-growth could reach skywards, free from the damaging appetites of cattle or deer grazing in the sparse undercanopy.Molly's hooves rustled through the layer of beech leaves littering the path ahead and I soaked up the atmosphere. I lit my first cigar.The world is at its best when viewed from the back of an easy walking horse It has little to do with the extra height - though it helps For me, it is a physical thing. When on foot it is impossible to look up, or to one side for more than a moment or two without stumbling.When walking with a rucksack, the sounds and smells go unnoticed in the rhythmic lung-rush of air.