The special place in your heart: From Gerald Durrell's Corfu to the Luangwa Valley in Zambia

We all pine for somewhere that will allow us a better, truer life – and for nature writer Simon Barnes, it lies among the lush vegetation of deepest rural Zambia. But such a sanctum needn't be geographical: for most of us, it exists in the mind

Zambia, one of the continent’s most fertile countries produces a wide range of foods including maize, rice, millet, sorghum, and sweet potatoes (Alamy)

Where's yours?

Because we've all got one. It's an aspect of being human. It's something to do with love, and very often with loss.

A secret special place: enclosed and tingling with magic: the sort of magic that comes from memory, from imagination, from pain, from hope. I've always seen it as a place where the wild creatures are bigger, tamer, more confiding, more exotic than they are elsewhere, imparting a sense of profound privilege.

Sometimes these places exist in stories, fables and myths: Eden, Narnia, Shangri-La. Sometimes they exist in golden memories of childhood, like Gerald Durrell's Corfu: or perhaps in a single picnic when all the family were in a good temper and the sun shone ungrudgingly.

Sometimes they exist in the one perfect day of a beautiful doomed love affair, the sort of memory that has people recklessly seeking reunions with first loves, often with disastrous consequences. Sometimes they exist in memories of places we daren't return to, for fear that the place has changed beyond recognition. Or we have.

Or perhaps all of the above. Most of us can lay claims to most of such experiences, being human, being vulnerable to such things as love and loss. But sometimes these places exist in the real world, and are not soiled by time or change or weariness. They remain in our hearts and our lives as special places that welcome a return, because of the robust nature of the beauty and their meaning.

The Luangwa Valley in Zambia has always been that place for me. I knew it from the moment I woke up in the middle of my first night in the valley and realised that someone was eating my house. I peered from the window and saw that a gang of elephants was snacking on the thatch, moving across the grass on vast bedroom-slippered feet.

I felt that treacherous thrill that was to become a part of me: the interwoven sensations of fear and joy, of privilege and danger: and it seemed that these things were inextricable. I have been back many times and always found the place better than last time: each visit placing layers of meaning onto the past and for that matter, the future.

I later realised this experience was not just about my relationship with my valley. It was also – it was really – about humanity's relationship with the world. So I wrote my new book, The Sacred Combe (a “combe” is a valley, or hollow), in the belief this place has a specific location:.It lies in the heart of every human being who ever drew breath. It is a place of perfections where the routine disappointments and disillusionments of daily life can be set aside, at least for a while… if only in the imagination.

In my father's downstairs loo there's a spoof script, a retirement jape from his BBC colleagues. Among the jokes about weeping children, tearful popes and mourning royals there is a golden future painted for him: and it's a Caribbean beach. Cue visuals of a drink with an umbrella in it.

This has become a coarsened, populist view of the Sacred Combe. Perhaps we would call it the Secular Beach, even though it has some aspects of holiness about it: a vision of tranquillity and comfort far from the madding world. The Secular Beach is a fantasy about paradise, even though such an existence would pall, for most of us, after about 20 minutes.

The defining feature of paradise is that it's lost. I suspect that the dream of paradise became part of enduring human experience when we invented agriculture. It was the path to certainty and security, but its price was eternal slavery.

Paradise re-found: humans came from the wild savannahs, not from urban landscapes (Alamy)

Eden is a piece of sharp nostalgia for our hunter-gatherer days: for a time when fruit fell off the trees and everything that breathed was our friend. The best image of that place from which humans are forever excluded is in the painting by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Bruegel the Elder. Rubens did the naked couple – Adam apparently mesmerised by the fine breasts of his Eve – and the horse and part of the tree, while Bruegel added the romping leopard and tiger, the two species of macaw, the goldeneye, the purple gallinules and the rest of the riotous profusion.

It's a picture of immense joy. It's also the greatest look-behind-you moment in history, or in mythology. Eve is offering an apple as well as her naked self, and we all know what happens next. Trouble would follow as the sparks flew upwards.

This moment of disaster goes into reverse gear when, deep in the English countryside, the Pevensie children enter a wardrobe. While seeking to escape from a sense of displacement and persecution – the insecurities of childhood and the Second World War – they find themselves in a place where animals talk, where you can take tea with a faun, where a wonderful lion can defeat death and heal the world's harms.

Thus in the first volume of The Chronicles of Narnia we enter humanity's heartland, the Sacred Combe. We meet danger – evil, betrayal, reality – and we see how they can be conquered. The children return to their own world and are haunted for the rest of their lives by that experience.

I knew such things as a child. After all, I rowed Moley up and down the river to picnics, for I was Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. I also climbed all the trees in the forest and waged war with the lame tiger, for I was Mowgli in The Jungle Book and, when I dared, I was also Bagheera the black panther, the coolest dude in the history of literature.

I was also Robin Hood, Lord of the Greenwood for significant years of my life. But it was never the actual stories about Robin Hood that haunted me. That surprises me, looking back, because the reading and the telling of tales has been, if you like, the story of my life.

It was the situation that enthralled. Or rather the place itself. Robin wasn't the star: what mattered was the Greenwood itself – and the idea of living in secret. What I loved most was the hidden life, the ideal world that existed in parallel to the oppressions and inconveniences of the real one.

It was the same when I was Tonto. I wasn't all that worried about the fight for law and order in the Early West, which was the ostensible subject of The Lone Ranger: I just wanted to be at home in that wild wonderful landscape with my horse Scout. The daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains was very much a secondary concern.

One of my first works – perhaps still my greatest – was “Hector Hedgehog”. I was seven when I wrote it. I don't think I got very far beyond the opening verse. Still, the verse propounds the philosophical premise for this work and for my current one.

My name is Hector Hedgehog.

I live among the trees.

The hearty home in the bracken!

The heart home in the trees!

Here then, is an uncompleted – largely unwritten – masterpiece unconditionally concerned with the Sacred Combe. Hector was an ideal self living in an ideal world: a Shangri-La of trees and bracken in which he had his being and pursued his wild life. The spell of such things has been on me all my life, and I suspect the same thing is true of most of us: we pine for a place where we can find a better and a deeper life, if only for an hour.

Ten years and more later, if it came to the put-to, I might have explained the Sacred Combe and Hector's domain as a way of escaping from life rather than engaging with it. “Not forever by still water would we idly rest and stay,” we sang in the hymn during school assembly… even though the still waters of the Sacred Combe seemed far more attractive than the recommended alternative of striking the living fountain from the rocks along our way. No, I thought bracingly, the Sacred Combe is a soft fantasy that distracts us from the real business of living in the real world and dealing with life as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.

Fast-forward another dozen years or so. I came to a different understanding of the idea when I first went to Minsmere, the RSPB's great reserve on the Suffolk coast. When I was a boy, the compelling story of the wild world was all about avocets: how the avocet had gone extinct as a British breeding bird, and how they had miraculously returned, to Minsmere and elsewhere. It was a story that haunted my childhood.

I was past 30 and much travelled by the time I first went to Minsmere. I remember to this day the moment I opened the wooden flap in the hide and gazed out across The Scrape and saw that it was impossible to bung a brick without hitting an avocet. I felt as if I was staring out at a field of unicorns. It was a homecoming.

And I realised then that our nostalgia for the Sacred Combe is not just about our willed slavery and the need to earn a living, it is also about our separation from the wild world: and our soul-deep need to join up with it again.

You can find thousands of suggestions for your bucket-list and practically all of them are to do with the wild world: swim with dolphins, shower under a waterfall, learn to fly, sail, ride, see a baby turtle walk to the sea…

Last year I was in Badlands National Park in South Dakota and I watched a coach-load of people who clearly had put the Badlands Wall at sunset on their bucket-lists. It seemed that they had got there just in time. Slowly, stiffly and by not so very easy stages, they made their way back onto the bus: a little richer, a little closer to the earth than when they had left it.

We seek the wild world in a thousand different ways, and often we're not really aware that we're doing so. Going for a nice walk is the most popular leisure activity in the country. People keep dogs who drag them outside every single day. People keep cats because they retain their wild nature and bring it into their homes.

People tend their gardens, go fishing, jog through parks and along rivers, play golf, ride horses. We take weekends in the country, we go to the seaside in the summer. Many people choose to live in the suburbs, to bring a little green into their lives. Many plan a move to the country to take place on some auspicious day and fulfil a dream… a dream of the Sacred Combe, nothing less.

But we are becoming nature-deprived, and we are bringing up a generation of nature-deprived children, the first generation in history with a lower life expectancy than their parents. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has chucked out such words as adder, heron, kingfisher, minnow, thrush, blackberry, bluebell, bramble and poppy: and brought in blog, broadband, voicemail, attachment, database, chatroom, bullet point and cut-and-paste.

A generation ago, 40 per cent of children played regularly in natural areas; the current figure is 10 per cent. It's been established that 40 per cent of children never play outdoors at all. The problems of ADHD in children are a great worry to educationalists and are often treated with drugs; outdoor activity appears to reduce the symptoms of ADHD by 30 per cent in urban surroundings and by 300 per cent in a rural setting.

In other words, nature-deprivation isn't just about acorns. It's about mental and physical health: spiritual health too, if you like. It's intimately associated with happiness: the wild world helps us to deal more easily with pain and loss, and allows us to take more pleasure and satisfaction in the lives we lead.

And that, ultimately, is why we search for the Sacred Combe. It is for a sense of completion. Humans first walked upright on the savannahs of Africa and our wild minds are millions of years old. We have been city folk for two or three centuries: not long enough to change the fundamental nature of our beings.

Without the wild world we are less than our full selves. That's why we seek it in stories and myths and sometimes, just sometimes, in reality. It's not about expertise or naming of names – that's why I wrote a book called How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher – for all that these things bring added pleasure. Perhaps more than anything else, it's about breathing the same air as our fellow animals.

I was last in the Luangwa Valley just after the rains had come, and it was as if it had rained impala lambs. These elegant antelope drop their young with the first rains, so they are born into a land newly blessed. Life springs dizzily from one side of the valley to the other and everywhere there is water to drink.

I took tea beneath a baobab in which three different species of weavers were building their recklessly complicated nests and my last morning began with a traffic jam: 30 elephants blocking the way and a big old bull ready to walk straight through us. We backed down with good grace.

Now, I write these words back home in Norfolk, after a glimpse of a marsh harrier from my desk, a bird that in 1971 was down to a single breeding pair in this country. As I wrote The Sacred Combe my mind kept straying back to my hippy past and to the Incredible String Band, whose music these days requires, if not excuse, then a little defiance.

“Always looking looking looking for a paradise island,” they sang. “Help me find it… everywhere…”

A reconnection with the wild world helps you do precisely that, even in cities. I once saw a peregrine falcon make a high-speed pass across the dome of St Paul's Cathedral and I've often seen terns fishing in the Thames.

The wild world is one vast secret special place, and every single spot that we fail to destroy is someone's Sacred Combe. Are we allowed more than one? Of course we are. Long may all of yours remain safe.

'The Sacred Combe' by Simon Barnes (£10.99, Bloomsbury) is out now​