Yet more galloping about in the heather, in the late 17th century as an anxious nation awaits the departure of James III and the arrival of William of Orange. John Buchan's John Burnet of Barns has his estate to worry about, and his girl, and knows that his wicked cousin Gilbert will have them all if he can. For law-abiding folk who believe in virtue being its own reward.

Romping over the heather, running through the hills, scampering among the dragoons, and tearing down the hill to the ferry to get across the river in time: can there be anything more exhausting than reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped? A great swashbuckling novel of the aftermath of the 1745, for readers who can run with their sword drawn.

Digging your own rabbit burrow? This is the manual for you. On the run from foreign gunmen with multiple passports? Look no further than this novel for career advice. Need guidance on how to hide in open country and survive without being spotted for weeks? Household's Rogue Male is the classic text for aspirational survivalists. For armchair outdoorsmen.

Extraordinary though it might seem, a pompous, arrogant, opinionated and stuffy Prussian military man, in a wet and windy English summer, five years before the First World War, makes the funniest caravan holiday ever, in Elizabeth von Arnim's The Caravaners. His wife is delightful, their fellow travellers are patient, even the horses are well-behaved, and Baron Otto von Ottring is a magnificent comic creation for us all to stand back and admire, and avoid. For those who had caravan holidays in their youth which have strangely never recurred.

Imagine a planet where men simply die, they can't live there, and so its society is composed entirely of women. They have children, they trade, they try and kill each other, they're surviving. What happens when a Company ship lands security staff and militarised colonists to try and take over this agricultural world barely out of the Iron Age? Nicola Griffith's Ammonite: for readers who take their anthropology seriously.

In a post-nuclear holocaust world, how does science get transmitted? Who understands medicine? How do societies adapt and learn from each other? Vonda McIntyre's marvellous novel Dreamsnake about doctors and patients hardly mentions the gender thing, because equality is a given. For readers who like their utopias dystopic.

Splish, splosh, let's go swimming. Oh look, an otter. A jellyfish! No, that's pondweed. Mind the pike. Did it bite your nose or was that a leech? Oops, a rock, down we goooo. Roger Deakin's Waterlog swims around Britain, in wild water and posh pools, arguing with water bailiffs and enjoying the tickle of sunny water on his toes. For armchair paddlers.

Birds, birds, more birds and precious few home comforts. Robert Atkinson's Island-Going is about sailing and camping in the roughest of weathers in the Outer Hebrides in the 1930s, looking for some very tiny birds and animals, summer after summer. North Rona, Handa, the Shiants, St Kilda, and Sula Sgeir are visited, docketed, deeply appreciated, and left to their own devices again. Millions of puffins, thousands of predatory greater black-backed gulls, and really rather large numbers of the elusive Leach's fork-tailed petrel. Bring your own sleeping-bag.

Kathleen Jamie's Findings is a book of nature writing so hard to pin down, we just need to think about the key words; poet, kitchen window, hills, cycling, skulls, ospreys, peregrines, corncrakes, binoculars, weathercocks, the fragility of the body and its parts, and looking closely at whatever you missed the first time. For naturalists with soul.

Let's go for a walk: through time, through mud, through woods, up roads, past hedges, through rivers, round ponds, over moorland, down dales, on high roads and low roads, to the sea, all laid out and explained by the brilliantly readable Oliver Rackham in his History of the Countryside. Walking boots not required, not yet.