The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
If you go down to the woods today
In an extract from his new book, Peter Fiennes loses himself in myth, magic – and oak trees – on the Peloponnese peninsula
The morning after I had spent a day dreaming of victory in the Olympic stadium, and marvelling at the statues in the museum, and prostrated by despair in a local café, I set off for a day’s hiking in the Foloi Forest. I was heading first for some kind of environmental or learning centre on the edge of the forest, which a blog I had found recommended as the best place from which to start a long hike through the gorges and wooded hills. (I would find maps and guides and useful leaflets about the local flora and fauna). On the way, I took a wrong turning and followed a sign to the village of Foloi.
I found myself in a small square with the inevitable dead or sleeping dog, bushels of bougainvillea and a couple of old men, who stared at me from the dusty terrace of a bar with an early glass of retsina in their hands. I asked them the way to the “environmental centre”, heaven help me, but they didn’t speak English and pointed me towards a young, plump, lushlybearded priest standing by the small church, who was supervising the erection of some wooden scaffolding.
The priest was very friendly, but regretfully let it be known through signs and smiles that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I gave up on my “environmental centre” and tried the words “learning” and “teach” and even “museum”, which led to a flurry of arm-waving and a few simple words for slow foreigners (“sosta”, “yes!”, “aristera”). And so I headed back to my car parked in the dusty square, with the priest following (looking, in retrospect, rather surprised), and I set off, the old men staring.
After only about a hundred yards I arrived at the front of the village school, which I now realised was where he had been trying to send me. It was closed, though, and when I looked in my rear-view mirror, there was the priest, huffing towards me along the street, smiling and waving at the boarded-up school and flourishing an enthusiastic thumbs-up. I gave the horn a short, apologetic “toot” (into which I think I also managed to inject a symphony of gratitude, sorrow and regret) and I drove away.
Some time later, I found my “environmental centre”, a small wooden shack set back from the road in a straggle of oak trees. It was also closed, but that didn’t matter because I had my phone with its GPS and I just wanted to get walking, I didn’t care where, so long as it involved a cool river and a shaded bank. The day was already very hot.
The Foloi Forest is one of the largest old-growth beech and oak forests in Greece, and once upon a time it was home to the centaur Pholus (hence its name), who was a great friend of Heracles. Centaurs were men with the hindquarters of a horse (or horses with the heads and torsos of men), and the Greeks regarded them with suspicion and fear. They were primitive and prone to violence and you would regret letting them anywhere near your wine stores.
Mary Renault rather surprisingly portrays them in her second
Theseus book as a lost tribe of horse-riding Neanderthals. One of them, Cheiron, was unusually civilised and intelligent, and he was the centaur who educated Achilles and Asclepius and other heroes, and brought them up on the wild slopes of Mount Pelion, nourishing their understanding of nature, before they headed off to slay monsters or heal the world.
Pholus was the only other centaur you could trust, and one time when Heracles was on his way to capture the terrifying Erymanthian boar, he stopped for a meal with Pholus in his cave, but when the other centaurs got wind of the wine they were drinking a fight broke out, and Heracles killed most of them with his poisoned arrows (dripping with the blood of the Hydra).
The survivors fled south to Cape Malea, but Pholus (who was kind but also maybe a little bit dim) picked up one of the arrows and dropped it on his foot and died in agony. One more magical creature extinguished.
So obviously I am not expecting to meet a centaur (if they are anywhere, they are in Malea) but I thought I might see some signs of a boar. Erymanthia is just north of here, connected by the sprawling forest. And there are also eagles (sacred to Zeus), owls (Athena), snakes (Hermes), doves and sparrows (Aphrodite), crows (Apollo), goats, of course (Pan and Dionysus), and howling dogs (Hekate), but no peacocks for Hera. There are also pine martens, hares, weasels, foxes, skylarks, squir
rels and badgers. The acorns from the ancient oaks draw in a teeming mass of birds and mammals, while the foliage and the fungi seethe with insect life.
It is the very end of October. Inside the woods, what human noise there was has vanished, the cars silenced on the faraway road, and I am alone with the shrill chirping of the robins, a slight wind stirring the oak leaves, and the distant complaint of goats and the hollow dongle of their bells, somewhere out there in the hidden forest.
There are times when, heading down the hill, I leave the tree cover and join a wide, red earth path, baked dry and powdery in the sun. Fat bees drift by, nosing at the thyme. The smell of herbs and yesterday’s rain in the sunshine is intoxicating and my mighty hike has already dissolved into a languid, summer’s day stroll.
I find a few shreds of snakeskin and stop altogether and stare at them. I have only been walking about 20 minutes. I am in a clearing at the top of a high gorge, the river far below, way down over the green of the trees, mostly oaks – Hungarian and holm – snared with ivy and the tangled cotton heads of old man’s beard, but there are groves of olive trees too, kept clear for the harvest.
Anyway, what with the bees in the thyme, and the butterflies on the sage, and the lizards crouched on their red rocks, progress is desperately slow. And then there is the sound of falling water… and the views. There is nothing to see except for the tops of trees, radiating a livid green, streaked darker by the holm oaks, and the valley moulded into a deep “V”, from the high hills on either side down to the invisible river.
It weaves a shadow through the distant canopy, and sometimes there is a cleft of red or light-brown rock, where the soil has slipped. Then straight ahead, up to the pale, far-off mountains, there is still more forest, and more trees, and only the very tips of the mountains are bare, tickling a couple of clouds in the blue ecstatic sky.
I sit down on a smooth rock next to a small bush of sweet marjoram and give up on the very idea of a walk. It is too hot and everything is too beautiful and the warm embrace of the herb is drugging. Marjoram was created by the smiling goddess Aphrodite as a sign of good luck.
Just behind the marjoram there is a myrtle tree, with its dark-green, spear-shaped leaves and pale purple berries, some of them already turning a pure midnight black. People say that this was Aphrodite’s favourite tree, a symbol of love and innocence.