WHEREVER it is you want to go in Winchester, getting there nearly always seems to involve plodding up a ghastly steep hill.

If your Winchester destination is one of the few that doesn’t involve walking up a hill, it will probably involve walking down one – and that just means you postpone your uphill slog till the return journey.

Winchester’s exhausting topography may put you off walking anywhere. Who wants to get tired legs and sweaty trainers just strolling round the block?

It’s all very well saying there are great views to be had from St Catherine’s Hill and St Giles’s Hill but, as Winchester residents all know, a foolhardy expedition to such places will inevitably lead to exhaustion.

There is a brute of a hill on the west side of Winchester, up through Stanmore and Badger Farm to Oliver’s Battery. I would guess that people living in Oliver’s Battery occupy the highest part of Winchester and I reckon they reside about 100 metres above the lowest part, which is down by the River Itchen. If any OB residents are nimble enough to tackle the walk home from the middle of town they will be doing the equivalent of climbing the stairs of a block of flats about 24 storeys high. Hard work if you’ve got shopping.

Living in super-flat Amsterdam was the best time of my life. No brute hills there. The steepest thing was an occasional little humpback bridge over a quaint canal.

I’m a natural moaner but even I can see there is a bright side to living in an up and down town like Winchester. In fact lots of bright sides. I have come round to the view that the hills are one of the best things about Winchester. Hills flatter the place and make it more dramatic. When you look up the High Street to the medieval West Gate, the gradient adds interest. The former Peninsula Barracks and Oram's Arbour would be half the spectacle they are if they were on the level, and the look of sweet St John the Baptist Church wouldn’t be half as pretty if it wasn’t reached from a steep path up from Water Lane.

 Hills strengthen Winchester’s character. They literally give the place an extra dimension compared to Hampshire’s two-dimensional flat towns like Southampton and most of Portsmouth.

The ancient Wessex capital sits pretty in a valley where the Itchen flows through a ridge of chalk. The massive ridge, about 30 miles long, runs from Michelmersh to East Meon and forms part of the west end of the South Downs, whose other end is Beachy Head in Sussex.

The effect is a vast chalk cradle protecting Winchester. Flat towns ringed by flat countryside sometimes give the impression they were plonked there, while Winchester almost feels like a natural organism, nestling in a perfect spot at a fordable water crossing between two well-drained slopes.

Views of the historic buildings of Winchester are delightfully framed by the surrounding hills behind them, to the envy of ancient architecture in flatter towns.

Hills are one aspect of our town that will never change. Architects, planners and politicians can build over every patch of ground but nothing they can do will take away Winchester’s hills (I think it’s safe to say that, although I admit that in the 1990s builders of the M3 did cart away almost five acres of Twyford Down).

Recently I have tried to adopt a healthy attitude towards Winchester’s forbidding gradients, by accepting them as a challenge. Now I relish steep streets and paths, striding up them at a rapid pace. I even run up for short bits. Who cares about aching thighs or sweaty socks when uphill speed keeps you fit and well? The more uphill my lifestyle, the longer I will live, I tell myself.

Hilly Winchester enhances your life and can lengthen your life.