Meteora

Meteora is a truly remarkable place and one of the world's strangest: a forest of vast sandstone buttes and spires topped by ancient Byzantine monasteries, rising clear of the plains of northern Thessaly. This numinous place has the capacity to move you profoundly, irrespective of your beliefs or lack of them.

Meteora was once seabed. When crushed and forced upward by tectonic movement, the hard agglomerate sandstone composed of smooth stones and silt from ancient rivers cracked and subsequently eroded, leaving today's towers with their enormous, smoothly sculpted cliffs. Their greys are transformed to glowing ocres at sunset.

Hermits made their homes in caves and under overhangs in Meteora's cliffs from the eleventh century or earlier. Monastic communities evolved, in part as a result of increasing pressure from the marauding Turks, built on rocky towers, with access only by ladder or in baskets pulled up on ropes to heights of several hundred metres. Meteora means suspended in the air in Greek; seldom has a name been so fitting.

In its prime, Meteora had 24 monasteries and nunneries; only six are now active, the rest in ruins and often inaccessible.Monasteries were bombed and artwork stolen during the Second World War, and the local town of Kalambaka was razed to the ground in reprisal against partisan activity. These monuments are now, deservedly, a World Heritage Site.

Their fame means that the monasteries are now overwhelmed by tourism, with buses locked on the access roads and huge crowds in the most famous of them. It can be thoroughly depressing.

Fortunately, you can walk away from all this along ancient paths between these secluded communities. These trails are generally not well signed or maintained (or indeed mapped), and you can find yourself struggling through thick undergrowth. But they have huge atmosphere and can be thrilling. Walking on tracks and lesser roads can thus be a good option, if a bit less atmospheric. You need to choose your route carefully, to avoid the worst horrors of modern tourism; the trails in the northwest and east are perhaps the best areas for the serious walker, and the ascent of the Holy Spirit rock described here by William Mackesy is astonishing.