We climbed stone stairs no one had tread regularly for a very long time…

we were off our path but we didn’t yet know it, because we were on someone’s path — though no one in the past few days perhaps. We followed faint traces to climb through heat and humidity, nettles and brambles stinging against our legs. Drawing blood. The valley opened up beneath us and we entered into pine forest — the first we had been in this trip.

A lovely, open pine forest scenting the air and full of light, not the close packed replacement and industrial forests. We had strayed from the way, but it didn’t matter because we found this.

A beautiful, eerie landscape

where stone-built walls and quarried stone faces mingled, all of it swallowed by moss and pine needles and trees so the natural world and the human one were almost indistinguishable.

Great slabs of stone, whether tumbled down or piled up almost impossible to tell, alongside great chimneys of rock.

Ferns of a green I still find hard to imagine, coming from the desert. The green of my dreams as a little girl.

Enormous mossy stones in piles

Sunlight streaming down through the trees, and everywhere a verdant landscape spilling across the distance. And us there, up above it in this place of human effort and labour swallowed up by the forest. This lonely place of memory now, and stillness.

Happy accident that brought us here. We followed this track back down the hill, and then found our way.

Of that more tomorrow…

Save