Camino Invierno 2. Borrenes to Puente de Domingo Flores. 19 kms

It seems rather sad that this blogger’ll

Fill up his page with this doggerel.

But it helps pass the time

As he continues to climb,

In fact, it’s more aptly called sloggerel.

Those of you new to the blog, may be wondering about the bits of doggerel that appear every so often. (Does he think he is a poet?) No, let me explain.

I really don’t like walking, I mean the act of walking. I like everything around me when I walk , the birds and the trees and the animals and the tinkling sound of cow bells. But sometimes when there’s nothing to divert me, I compose a bit of verse to pass the time. I dictate my thoughts to the phone. This little bit of rambling, for example, has got me a little way up a hill.

Yesterday, another pilgrim couple arrived at the hotel and we had dinner together. They were Camino veterans both. Interestingly, he had walked the Francés in the same month as I, nineteen years ago. We might have passed each other on the Way.

We ate a magnificent garlic soup and recalled the priest at a monastery just before León who used to make the soup for the pilgrims. After supper he would make the pilgrims say or sing something about their own country. I remember that I sang Waltzing Matilda.

Early in the morning, I left the hotel walked along the road for a kilometre and then off on a track beside a dried up creek bed. Beside me, the leaves of the poplars beside me were turning yellow and I could see pine trees high above me on a ridge. This is a very peaceful walk.

A whiff of woodsmoke in the air,

A humble hearth where people care.,

A little cabin in the wood

Where love abides and all is good.

And then a short climb over a hill,  down into the next valley, and then up again to the road, a short stretch along the highway, and then a long, long, not-so-gentle climb out of the valley and up to the pass ahead of me, marked on one side by a massive rocky promontory looking a little like something out of Lord of the Rings.

I arrived at Las Medulas. Feeling a little guilty about taking a shortcut yesterday, although I couldn’t possibly have managed the climb, I decided to visit the Roman mines. Even although it entailed a three-kilometre detour. 

The rocky promontory I had seen, turned out to be one of a series of conical mounds of red conglomerate containing alluvial layers that the Romans had mined for gold. To get at these layers the Romans would mine, in the medieval sense of the word, the layers above, causing them to collapse. (I got this information from the English translation on an information panel). I wondered how  many miners had lost their lives in this dangerous process. They were probably slaves.

The Latin expression for this destructive process was ruina montium, the ruin of the mountain. I suppose the modern equivalent of this ancient process is open cut mining.

The path leading up to the conical hills was lined with chestnuts, some with massive gnarled trunks. What a character of a tree is the chestnut!

Leaving Las Medulas I continued to gently climb for one and a half kilometers, and then it was (almost) downhill all the way.

Over the hill and round the bend, and opening up before me was a wide, deep valley, with lots of pine forest and roads striking out uphill. I hoped that none of them was mine.

I followed a minor road that clung to the side of the hill,  and then wound down into the  valley with pine plantations on either side.

I have to say the trail was well marked today with concrete markers, even along the  long stretches where it wasn’t  really necessary. Little piles of stones on top told me that pilgrims had gone before me, and at one place someone had constructed a stone heart on the trail. The only time I nearly went astray was earlier in the day when a car was blocking a marker. Fortunately, a kind lady put me right or I might still be walking in the wrong direction.

At last, I reached the floor of the valley, and walked towards the town along a leafy lane with just a gentle breeze in my face. And then, just to spite me, the track took a steep little climb over a hillock and then down into the village. And in the distance, I saw my first gum trees.