To celebrate Ascension-tide and the suddenly improving weather, I decided to walk up Criffel, a hill in Dumfries and Galloway. It is not in the big Galloway hills but down on the coast, and the views from the top are spectacular – it looks out across the Solway Firth towards the Lake District and its glorious long, high hill-line.

At 570 metres (around 1,900ft) it is not a huge ferocious mountain, but it is a proper stiff walk, and, unfit after the wet winter, I was soon struggling. However, the sun was shining, the sea was sparkling and the larks were imitating the Ascension itself and “going up with a merry noise”.

About halfway up I met a couple coming down. She, I was to learn, was three years old, and she was wearing a bright red bobble hat and sitting high up on the shoulders of a young man who turned out to be her father, with her shiny wellington boots tucked under his armpits and his hands steadying her with a firm grasp on her calves as he negotiated the steep, rough path.

And as soon as she saw me, she started to drum on his head with both her hands and called out in pure excitement, “I walked all the way to the top by myself”. And when we got close enough, he was laughing and said: “It’s true. She really did, you know.” It was hard to tell which of them was proudest of this genuinely impressive achievement.