During coronavirus, we can discover unexpected places, and find out more about ourselves

I love my children. And in some ways, this peculiar opportunity to spend more time with them is a boon – even when my son is following me around with a step so he can find a better angle from which to hit me with a cardboard tube.

But, my goodness, the strain of getting them out for their daily exercise! Their preference, if it really must be done, is a 200-yard meander down the hill to a nearby school car park, where they scoot or cycle about in a rather desultory fashion – assuming indeed that nobody else has got there first, in which case they have to make do with toing and froing along a tarmacked path. We, their adoring parents spectate, walk in circles of ever-increasing frustration.

There are no winners from all of this. The children don’t expend the energy that is so painfully and obviously pent up inside them: instead it emerges in tantrums (mostly from the 5-year-old) and a failure to go to sleep at a decent hour (mostly by the 10-year-old). I end up with a perpetual, low-grade sense of irritation, which even half an hour of star jumps and burpees can’t shift.

Battling against the desired car park outing is no fun. The cry of “it’s not fair!” rings out loud, clear and like clockwork when we propose a proper walk. And yet, in the end, it pays to persist. True, the children may not move at a great pace, but an hour or so on foot does everyone the power of good. Moods lift, almost visibly.

What’s more, the instruction to take exercise directly from home has taken us to places we barely knew before. To discover previously untrodden paths close by, when we have lived here for well over a decade, feels frankly bizarre. And all those times we hopped in the car to drive to beauty spots a few miles away now seem shameful.

One of the routes we have found would, admittedly, be less pleasant in normal times: the path, snaking through a strip of woodland, is barely 20 yards from the A41. But with traffic barely existent, the sounds and smells of the dual carriageway are minimal.

The other walks we have come upon involve brief sections alongside usually busy roads too. But tarmac can be ignored if you look the other way and if it doesn’t go on too long. Soon enough, we can plunge steeply into a wood, or pass through farmland, depending on whether we head southeast or southwest.

On the Monday after Easter we persuaded the kids to drag themselves from their chocolate-dusted pits and to enter the sunlight. There was a spot of argy-bargy about whether to turn left or right after passing through the tunnel under the bypass, but pleasantness eventually prevailed and we found ourselves passing farmhouses in rolling countryside.

And then, quite unexpectedly, the path entered a narrow strip of woodland between arable fields (the map suggested the public right of way skirted the copse to the south). A rabbit bounded away from us through a mass of brambles, and ahead the winding path was hemmed in on both sides by bluebells in the first flush of blooming. It was, in my endless search for pathway perfection, a genuine contender.

The children skipped ahead for a while, although we soon bunched together again and edged into the wood in a huddle, as another party of lockdown escapees tramped the other way. Where we can, we hold our families tighter than ever these days, even when they wind us up the wall.

And as we discover new places to roam straight from our front doors, we can – in these strange times – find out unexpected things about ourselves and those we love.