One Monday routine here is to take the 8 30 bus up to the Centre - half way to the top of this rambling village in a valley - for the Monday market. If you are unlucky and miss the bus - as we did today - you walk, and a hot walk it is even at 9 am.


The main detail of this travelling market for us, among the stalls selling scythes and sickles, rat traps and donkey harness, shoes and clothing, biscuits, olives and cheeses - is Duran's vegetable stall. We buy enough for a week and it is delivered to our house later.

Now we set off on an ancient stony path down a tight green valley to the sea under a bronze age hill fort. Near the bottom there is running water - the reason this valley has been cultivated since the Carians ruled here 3000 years or more ago.

We emerge at some flat fields by a little bay. No one lives here now although fields are still tended by local people. There are pink sea smoothed pieces of ancient brick, tiles and pottery along the beach and in the water as well as massivley hewn limestone blocks and the occasional marble pillar.

We base ourselves under an old fig tree right on the water's edge we've aways called this pace Fig Tree Bay. From its shade we can see - apart from the bats and some telecoms towers - nothing in the long arcing curve of the Loryma Peninsula and a scatter of islands that completely enclose this bay - that would place us in the 21st, or any century.
 
Gareth Huw Davies