FIRST ACTION HERO

With characteristic straightforwardness, locals call it The Big Stone. It sits, oblong and 5.5m high, amid the heather on the moor outside High Bentham, at the edge of the Forest of Bowland, marking the border between Lancashire and Yorkshire. Suggesting that it was once part of a group, it’s known further afield as The Great Stone of Fourstones. Geologists refer to it as a ‘glacial erratic’, probably a piece of gritstone, transported by a glacier and left behind when the ice retreated thousands of years ago. Meanwhile, them Yorkshire folk reckon that’s nonsense, and that it was dropped by Satan himself on his way to build the Devil’s Bridge in Kirkby Lonsdale. Me? I’d lay odds that a Unimog left it here.

This certainly feels like Unimog country. Sure, it’s a sunny day, but these moorlands are windswept, and occasional trees shelter in folds, rarely defying the gusts. The Irish Sea glints in the distance to the west; north of here, the Three Peaks – Whernside, Ingleborough and Pen-y-Gent – tower above the already elevated landscape. As a Lancastrian by birth, I’m not about to refer to what’s over the border as God’s Own County, but it’s epic in scale and grandeur. The kind of, not a mere car. A vehicle that can get you into the scenery, rather than just going past it.