Of eagles, snakes and cheese. Picos de Europa.

Read beyond the sign. Cain, and its cheese cave.

Circular route. Cheese cave, waterfall. 5.5kms.

You see a sign for a 5.5km circular route.

You think “Great, I’ll knock that out in an hour and a half, have a coffee and then maybe I’ll look for another walk.”

But then you look up from the sign at the direction it’s pointing.

It’s pretty much a wall. A crazily steep climb that the 10 cm wide goat track switchbacks up into the distance.

The cheese cave circular route is mad, it’s hell, but it does get you to the cheese cave.

With your heart racing, lungs heaving and sweat dripping from everywhere you’re more grateful for the cool of the cave than you can ever imagine being.

When everything has calmed and your body starts to feel normal again you might well ask yourself an important question. Why on earth is there a cheese cave at least 2 kms from the village up a gradient that you wouldn’t want to climb more than once in a lifetime, let alone try either direction carrying a meaningful quantity of cheese.

The landscape is limestone: it’s not a hard rock. Surely it’d be easier to dig a cave into the hill at the back of your house?

José hadn’t thought of that.

Cain. The story of the old village and its cheese cave (according to Kelvin).

José stank like a dead goat’s arse.

He didn’t wash. He never had.

He didn’t clean his teeth. He never had.

His skin was old leather stretched over broken bones with the dirt of life rubbed in.

He was always dressed. The problem was that he never undressed. Same clothes. Different day. His grease made his clothes as waterproof as any Barbour.

His cough brought the phlegm of ten thousand filterless Camels. And his cough rarely stopped.

When he wasn’t coughing he muttered incoherencies that only his goats could ignore.

He was not a man who made friends easily.

He didn’t care too much. For above his shelter, a long way above, was his damp, cool, cheese cave. And there he intended to create magic.

When he proposed that his brothers move to his hill they didn’t listen.

When he build a stone shelter, and gave it a roof they didn’t come.

When he built a stone pen for his goats, and brought them back to it each night, folk were silently impressed, but no one commented for fear of ridicule from everyone else.

But when he left a small sample of his goat’s cheese on the rail of the bridge over the Rio Cares people wanted to know more.

A year later five of his eight brothers were building their shelters near his.

When he killed a brother outside his cave after an argument regarding when to pour goat’s piss on the young cheese folk named the settlement Caín.

Caín.

Once the home of the best Cantabrian blue cheese you’d ever taste.

Not the usual blend of cow’s and goat’s milk.

Just goat.

The settlement of Caín was made.

Or so it seemed.

When the dead brother’s twin came to the settlement intending to build he fell out with the others in no time.

In a huff he started his house by the bridge 600m below Caín.

“What a fool” mocked the others.

“He’ll be forever alone down there.”

“It’s so much further to walk to the cheese cave. He’ll be exhausted.”

But the brother, let’s call him Mahou, had a secret of his own.

Mahou had beer.

A bridge.

And beer.

What greater miracle could there be?

Mahou liked the irony of his brother’s settlement being called Caín.

And took the name for his bar.

Soon the remaining four brothers moved to the bridge. To New Caín. And the original settlement was forgotten.

They sold cheese. They sold beer. They sold a lot of beer.

They partied every night.

They discussed narrowing the road to slow the tide of American tourists.

And they sealed the hacking, stinking José into his own cave. With his goats. With his cheese. With his stench.

The real Caín.

I have no idea why the people of Caín moved from the high village to the bridge, but it makes perfect sense to me.

There’s free parking.

There are half a dozen bars, a couple of shops selling everyday essentials such as bread, cheese and walking sticks.

Tourists flock through despite the inaccessibility of the village. And the taximan makes a fortune driving tired gorge walkers back to their hotels.

And no one serves dinner before 8pm.

Hotel Eigon. Posada de Valdeón.

Four nights in hostels. Cheap. Spare. Basic. Noisy. Functional.

Yesterday I moved into a hotel. Smart. Quiet. Comfortable. Gentle jazz.

I miss the hubbub of the hostels. The jazz could drive me to genocide.

Otherwise it’s great.

The expensive breafast is luxurious. Luxurious fruits, nuts, hand knitted yogurt and cheese. It’s a shame that’s exactly what Chuck’s footwell mini-market has to offer.

With the heat supressing my appetite, and my squirrel’s diet of fruit and nuts I may waste away. But probably not.

No hostel tonight. Hotel Eigon. Posada de Valdeón.

Of eagles and snakes.

There’s a lot of up around these parts. And even when you’ve got up there, there are still mountains soaring up a whole lot closer to God.

On my morning’s heart pounding climb I was contemplating Japanese writer Murakami’s Buddist mantra that he applies to his running. “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” When an activity is hard I try to apply my own meaning to this. Today that meaning is – I’m doing this out of choice. No one made me do this. So get a grip and enjoy it. I only have to look around and my grimace cracks into a grin. There’s beauty in every direction.

You get up there. And then there’s a load more up.

At just the right time though I was looking down and contemplating the flower viper’s bugloss. It’s everywhere here. It’s particularly beautiful in big patches. As I wondered about its name a gorgeous collared snake slithered away up the path. I was about the length of my forearm, and gone before I could reach for my phone to take a photo.

I was still grinning at my good fortune to have seen the snake when something happened that raised my delight to unknown pleasures.

I’d all but crested the climb.

I could see the descent winding off into the distance.

Then there was a sudden woosh of air beside me.

I whipped my neck to the left as an utterly enormous golden eagle glided by within a few feet of my head.

An eagle. A f***ing golden eagle. Right there beside me.

At any distance their size is impressive. Close up they are formidable. Even when it was 50m away it was still thrilling.

I floated down the hill on a high the like of which I can’t ever remember experiencing.

Santa Marina de Valdeón.

The highest village in the Picos de Europa.

In Santa Marina the shop’s in town.

The shop’s an ingenious chill truck with three winged sides that provide deep shade for the dozen or so women doing their week’s shopping.

Surely this would work for villages at home.

Who knows? Maybe we’d even let the men engage in a little consideration of what it takes to put food on the table rather than stroking their bellies all day at the bar as they do here.

Refugio La Ardilla Real does it all. Restaurant. Dormitory. Bar. Coffee shop. Talking shop. It was probably the council chambers too back when this high village was self governed.

It’s guarded by two white Alsatians and a wolf. Wolf comes and lies by me. I’m glad Wolf is my friend.

As I sit savouring my usual order of a caña and a coffee the second shop of the day pulls up.

This one’s the baker.

The bar takes much of his supplies. The young women pick from the rest as the old women tutt at them for having lost the skill of baking.

The men stroke their bellies while imagining stroking those young buttocks, “who cares if they can’t bake, they’d only take half the room in bed” (and other thoughts the priest insisted I delete).

The old women laugh at them and one tells her husband “That beautiful young thing was just telling me how much she fancied you, and saying how good you must look in your grey Y fronts pulled up to your saggy tits.”

The old men laugh at me as the bitey bastard flies take lunch from my salty legs.

Each of the old boys has had at least a bottle of red by 12.30. The flies prefer blood to wine. The old men’s bodies pump wine for protection.

I love this place, but the flies are too much. I’m moving on.

Of butterflies.

Further down the hill towards Posada de Valdeón the path enters woodland. The dominant tree is beech, but there is much oak, cherry and copied hazel.

Here’s a little tree fact for you. The scrubby hazel will grow to a few metres high but only last around 35 years on its own, but copice it (cut to down to almost ground level after about seven years, and again after a similar period thereafter) and it’ll live indefinitely, providing more wood each time it’s harvested.

The scent here is so clean. It’s what I imagine when I see the Marc Jacobs perfume ad with the girls in a flower meadow.

This story isn’t about hazel, or scent. It’s about butterflies.

Once you drop below about 1250m the tree cover is dense, but wherever the sun gets to the floor of the woodland there’ll be butterflies, especially if there’s a hint, but not a flow, of water.

Most days I see hundreds of them. They fly into you. They fly around you. And they’re beautiful. I read a report that suggested someone had recorded 90 different types during a week in the area.

Wonderful names like Scarce Copper, Marbled Skipper, Niobe, Marsh Fritillerie. What about Purple Hairstreak?

I remember there being very many in my parent’s garden in Redruth, and since we’ve left the fields go wild at Goldings there are certainly more, but nothing to compare with this wonder.

Purple Hairstreak (from Dorset Butterflies).

Pride before a fall?

I plan the next day’s routes in the afternoon.

By then I have walked, rested, showered, probably slept and drank a lot of water.

Put simply I have rested and feel great. I look back on the day’s effort and always think I could tackle more.

Yesterday afternoon I was plotting a route that advised sure footedness, high levels of fitness, and endurance. Very hard it said.

What was I thinking? With the lucidity of morning I swopped to a route advising modest degrees of all the above, yet still it climbed steeply for an hour and a half making the sweat burst forth as if from a shower head.

It was during that climb that the fall from my pride really came.

Two lads passed me.

Vikings.

Carrying army bergens (big rucksacks).

Wearing paraboots, shorts, not much else.

Their blond mops bobbing as they RAN up the hill. And they were chatting!

Did they really wear horned helmets, or did I dream that bit?

Although they made me feel my years I was so deeply impressed.

The philosophy of the trail.

Beyond the Vikings I only saw three others in today’s five hour walk.

All Germans.

The couple asked about the shade levels for the hour of climbing that was ahead of them. I replied honesty that I felt like I might die on the climb, but now on the descent I felt like I should be good for another thirty years.

And in a way that’s what effort is about. It can hurt like hell when you’re engaged in it, but it’ll feel great afterwards. If you’re really lucky you might even feel the joy while making the effort, but let’s not push these things.

The other German, a women on her own, had taken a bad fall several days before. Both legs were cut and one arm. Her sunburn looked even more painful. And her backpack? I don’t think I could have lifted it. She said she gets into the straps lying down, then works her way onto her knees and then pushes herself up. And she was beaming with the joy of it all!