Somerville particularly loved visiting wilderness places such as the snow-capped mountains of the Andes, the European Alps and the Rockies.
In 1968 he walked with his son, Lindsay, 200 km in the Nepalese Himalayas up the Kali Kandaki gorge near Annapurna, and in 1971 visited an outlying island of Fiji where they were the island's first tourists.