There are green hills, soft with hollows and shadows, the silver threads of waterfalls on remote mountainsides, and slopes covered in beech trees, their trunks impossibly tall and slender, the leaf canopy far above, the bronze of last year's autumn underfoot. The sun comes slanting down in stripes and dapples, transforming the whole forest into a dizzying kaleidoscope of light and shade. Higher up, the trees turn to pine and larch, the pines even taller and more slender than the beeches, and higher still, blue against a bluer sky, are mountain-tops, snow-drizzled even in summer. This is Narnia as Pauline Baynes drew it, hill and forest and peak, with the rivers tumbling down and the exquisite detail of tree and leaf - a land so perfect it could only exist in fantasy. The roads are few, most of those mainly tracks, and the traffic is generally horse-and-cart or, if you're really high-tech, tractor-drawn trailer. The occasional village sprawls along the valley-bottom, the houses with their sagging roofs and wide courtyard doors painted in candy colours, storks' nests adorning the telegraph poles, livestock meandering along the verge. The evening rush hour occurs when the cows decide to trundle home, blocking the single street. There are no desolate castles on the heights; the establishment credited to Dracula (though he only stayed there one night) is as harmless in appearance as a French ch?au.I was in Romania on a horse-riding holiday, based at a lodge above the village of Sinca Noua.
Once we climbed out of the valley, we saw neither houses nor people, though we glimpsed deer, quickly lost in the sun-dapple of the forest Out in the open, solitary buzzards wheeled overhead. Sometimes there was wolf spoor on the track, fresh in the mud, and the black nodules of bear droppings But if wolf or bear saw us, they gave no sign. Lynx also live there, but they are too cunning and shy for even the expert to spot, and the stripes and stipples of their coat make them invisible against the leaves. We heard cuckoos calling, and warblers, and golden orioles, and saw many small birds that didn't hang around to be identified.
The high meadows were full of flowers, vaguely familiar yet strangely different - apricot foxgloves, wild Canterbury bells, purple and pink and white orchids, many-petalled trumpets and whorls and stars in mauve and yellow.Our gallant horses scrambled uphill and slithered downhill, always eager for a chance to hoover up the endless deep grass Mine munched on trees, too. In places, we had to dismount to negotiate particularly difficult declines, or pick our way along rocky stream-beds with leaking boots and water over the ankle We didn't care. Trivial discomforts meant nothing beside the beauty and the quiet - the huge quiet that was always there, behind wind-murmur and leaf-murmur, behind the soft thud of hooves on earth, the jingle of a stirrup, the piping of a bird. The quiet of the first forests before men came, before cars and planes and all the noise and rumour of the modern world.
