I have lived in Crete long enough to know that there is no single Cretan landscape. The ground changes continually, not merely from place to place but from month to month, sometimes from one week to the next. A track ridden in February is not quite the same track in August. The stones are the same, the gradient has not altered and the mountain remains where it was, but almost everything through which I experience it has changed.

I know much of this country from a bicycle, and that matters. A bicycle places me somewhere between walking and travelling in a vehicle. I move quickly enough for the country to unfold and for distant places to become connected, but slowly enough to notice it. I feel gradients directly. I know when the surface changes beneath the tyres. I know where winter rain has cut a channel across a familiar track, where loose stone has accumulated on a descent, where vegetation has narrowed a path that was open a few months before. There are climbs whose steepness I know before I reach them, not from a map or a gradient figure, but because my body remembers them.

After years of riding the same country, there are places where I no longer need to ask what comes next. From Kokkino Chorio I can leave the village and begin climbing or descending through ground I have crossed many times. There are junctions, ridges, churches, walls, abandoned buildings, patches of woodland and turns in tracks that have become part of my internal geography. They are not necessarily important places in the conventional sense. Most would pass unnoticed by someone driving through, but repeated passage gives them significance.

Yet there are still tracks I have not taken. I see one leaving a familiar route and disappearing behind a wall, into woodland or around the side of a hill, and sooner or later I want to know where it goes. Sometimes it joins another track I know. Sometimes it deteriorates until riding becomes difficult. Sometimes it ends. Occasionally it takes me somewhere entirely unexpected. I can know exactly where I am without knowing what lies around the next bend, and after all these years I still find that difficult to resist.

I have come to understand Crete in this way: not as a collection of destinations, but as accumulated knowledge of the ground between them.

The foothills are particularly important to me. The high mountains command attention, as mountains inevitably do, but the foothills are where much of the life of the landscape can be read. Here cultivated and uncultivated ground meet. Olive groves give way to scrub. Tracks leave villages and begin to climb. Dry-stone walls cross slopes whose agricultural purpose may no longer be immediately apparent. Churches stand away from present settlements. Old paths continue across country long after the journeys for which they were made have ceased.

There are traces everywhere, but they do not announce themselves, and that is one reason I return. The more often I cross a piece of country, the less inclined I am to think that I know it completely. Familiarity does not bring the matter to an end. Quite often it does the opposite. Once the obvious things have become familiar, smaller things begin to appear.

Winter makes this particularly clear. Crete in winter is sometimes understood by people who know the island principally in summer as though it were merely summer Crete under bad weather. It is nothing of the sort. The ground becomes active. Rain enters the soil. Water appears in places that have been dry for months. Tracks soften, ruts deepen and streams return. Vegetation begins pushing into spaces from which the summer heat had withdrawn it. Limestone darkens under rain, cloud lowers onto the mountains and familiar summits disappear altogether.

Distances alter in poor visibility. A ridge that in summer appears to be part of a vast open landscape can become an enclosed place beneath low cloud. The bicycle becomes dirty, and so do I. Mud accumulates beneath the frame and around the tyres. Water runs down tracks that only weeks earlier were dust. Familiar descents require different decisions, because stone that is secure when dry becomes something else when wet.

I like the landscape in this condition. It requires attention. There is no abstraction between me and the weather or between the bicycle and the surface beneath it. The line through a piece of broken ground matters. So does the depth of a rut, the movement of water and the condition of loose stone. Attention becomes concentrated on what is immediately in front of me, and much of the unnecessary noise that occupies the mind elsewhere simply recedes.

There are rides when rain is visible moving across the country ahead, and others when the mountains disappear so completely that I know they are there only because I have seen them from the same place many times before. Then the cloud lifts, perhaps only partially, and a familiar shoulder or summit appears. I sometimes stop and watch this happen. The bicycle is suddenly quiet beneath me, water dripping from vegetation or moving somewhere below the track, and a mountain that had ceased to exist a few minutes earlier gradually returns.

Then comes spring, and there is a period in Crete when the country seems almost impossibly productive. Ground that appeared exhausted at the end of summer becomes green. Flowers occupy verges, terraces, olive groves and patches of apparently insignificant earth. Insects return in numbers. The air changes. Water may still be moving through the landscape while the increasing strength of the sun already suggests what is coming.

The mountains can still be carrying snow while I am riding through green foothills beneath them. I have always been struck by that compression of seasons: warmth in the lower country, flowers beside the track and winter still clearly visible on the Lefka Ori. The mountains are distant, but their presence changes the country beneath them.

Spring is perhaps the season in which familiarity is most frequently defeated. I can ride a track I have ridden dozens of times and find something beside it that I have never noticed before. Sometimes it was always there and I failed to see it. Sometimes vegetation has concealed or exposed it. Sometimes the light has changed. Sometimes I am simply looking in a different direction.

A surprising amount of my research begins with stopping the bicycle. There may be a roadside shrine, a piece of worked stone, an unusual wall, an abandoned building, an old sign, a church, a track whose alignment seems odd, or simply something I do not understand. I photograph it and continue riding, but the question comes home with me. A map is opened. Books come from shelves. One reference leads to another, and something that occupied perhaps thirty seconds of a ride can become several hours, sometimes several days, of research.

Occasionally it becomes a story.

This has become one of the ways in which the landscape and my writing are connected. I do not generally go out looking for subjects. I go riding, and the ground provides them. Tracks of the Minotaur could hardly have developed in any other way, because curiosity is part of the movement through the landscape rather than something imposed upon it afterwards.

There are particular climbs where all of this becomes concentrated, because the movement upwards carries me through different layers of the landscape and changes my relationship with the country as I go. The climb towards the Beehive is one of them. The lower country is left progressively behind as the route climbs through the foothills, through country that is still connected with villages and cultivation, and then farther into the rougher shepherd landscape.The change is experienced gradually. There is no point at which one landscape abruptly ends and another begins. The transition occurs beneath the tyres. The surface becomes rougher, the relationship with settlement changes and the mountain country begins to close around the route. Cypress woodland alters the light and temperature before the track continues upwards into more open ground. The bicycle slows on the steeper sections and attention narrows towards the surface immediately ahead: loose limestone, broken track, the choice of line and the continuing gradient. Then the country opens again and the lower landscape begins to be seen from above.The Beehive itself belongs to this ground. It is a mitato, a stone shepherd’s shelter of the kind that makes sense when understood within the pastoral landscape in which it stands. Yet for me it now carries another layer because of its wartime history and its association with the Special Operations Executive. I cannot separate what I have learned about the place from the physical experience of reaching it.

This is where approaching historical ground across the terrain becomes important. A map can establish location and distance and an account can describe men reaching or leaving a hideout, but neither entirely communicates what happens as the inhabited country falls away and the climb continues into the mountains. Crossing the ground changes my understanding of concealment and isolation. A line on a map becomes a succession of gradients, tracks, folds in the terrain, woodland, open ground and changes of visibility. By the time I reach the Beehive, therefore, I have not merely arrived at an historical location. I have travelled through some of the terrain that gave the location its meaning.

As spring advances, the mountains become clearer and more insistent. The snow retreats. The lower country begins drying and the great abundance of vegetation starts its own retreat. The grasses change colour, flowers disappear, tracks harden and dust returns. Crete begins its movement towards the long dry months.

Summer reduces the landscape, not in importance but in essentials. Water becomes precious because it is absent. Shade matters because there is less of it. Distance matters differently beneath a high sun. Exposed ground becomes genuinely exposed. The smell of dry vegetation, dust, warm stone and the aromatic plants of the hills becomes part of the experience of movement.

I ride early.

There is an obvious practical reason for doing so, but there is something else in those hours before the full heat arrives. The villages are quieter. Shadows still lie across parts of the road and track. The air retains something of the night and the mountains catch the light before the lower country has fully entered the day.

Then the sun climbs and the land changes again. Heat begins to return from the stone. Shade acquires value. Water becomes something I monitor rather than merely carry. A tree beside a track can determine where I stop. I put the bicycle down or lean it against a wall, drink, and for a few minutes do nothing except remain in the shade and look at the country around me. There is no reason to hurry away. The distance to the next village will remain the same, but after a few minutes beneath the tree I will experience it differently.

By late summer the country can appear stripped back to its structure. Rock, soil, wall, track and mountain become dominant. The lushness of spring seems improbable, although I know perfectly well that it will return. This is when the relationship between settlement and water, cultivation and soil, shade and exposure becomes particularly clear. The landscape is not empty. It is economical, and the things that survive or continue to function within it tend to be there for a reason.

Autumn does not arrive here with the certainty I remember from Britain. There is no single moment at which summer relinquishes the country. Heat can continue. Dust remains. The hills stay dry and pale. Then something begins to change. The light alters. Clouds appear over the mountains with greater frequency, and eventually the first substantial rain arrives.

The first rain after the long dry season is one of the great transitions of the Cretan year. The smell of the ground changes almost immediately. Dust settles, stone darkens and the surface of familiar tracks alters. Water begins finding old channels. Plants respond with a speed that still surprises me, and the long contraction of summer begins to reverse.

Then the cycle starts again, but it is never quite a repetition. The route may be familiar, but the conditions are not. The season has moved. The weather has changed. Something has grown, collapsed, been repaired, eroded or exposed. I have changed too, and sometimes I bring something to the landscape that I did not possess the last time I crossed it.

I may have read something. A piece of history encountered in a book or an archive can change a familiar landscape completely. A ridge I have crossed repeatedly acquires another meaning when I discover who once crossed it and why. An apparently insignificant track becomes important when I understand what it connected. The process also works in the opposite direction, because sometimes it is the ground that makes the document intelligible.

My military background undoubtedly influences the way I look at terrain. Where can people move? What can they see? Where is the dead ground? Where is the water? What lies beyond the ridge? These questions apply particularly to military history, but they also illuminate much older patterns of human movement and settlement. Farmers, shepherds, travellers, armies, resistance fighters and generations of people moving between Cretan villages all encountered the same fundamental realities of gradient, water, rock, distance, visibility and shelter.

My circumstances are incomparably easier. I ride a modern electric mountain bike. I carry navigation, water, tools and equipment, and at the end of the ride I return home. But the gradient has not changed for my convenience, nor has the limestone. A ravine still channels movement. A ridge still provides observation. A spring remains important because water emerges there rather than somewhere else. This is why maps and documents can take me only so far. Eventually, whenever possible, I want to stand on the ground.

Better still, I want to approach across it.

The climb from Anopoli into the White Mountains takes this relationship with terrain much farther. Anopoli already stands high above the south coast, beneath the mass of the Lefka Ori, but from there the mountain road continues north and upwards, leaving the inhabited plateau behind and penetrating progressively deeper into the high country.

Leaving Anopoli, there are still houses, cultivation, livestock, roads and the other evidence of a lived landscape. As the climb continues those signs gradually diminish. Vegetation changes with altitude. The country becomes increasingly bare and the limestone increasingly dominant. The relationship with water, shade and distance changes with it.

What interests me particularly about this climb is that the White Mountains cease to be something I am looking towards. For much of my life in Apokoronas, the Lefka Ori have been the great presence beyond the foothills. I see them from below and at a distance. I watch the first winter snow appear on them. I see cloud gather around them. In spring they remain white above country already turning green, and in summer they become pale beneath the sun.

From Anopoli the relationship is reversed. I am no longer looking at the mountains from outside. I am moving into them.

As height is gained, the familiar Mediterranean landscape falls away. The track enters increasingly severe limestone country and the scale changes. From a distance a mountain can appear comprehensible. Ridges and summits form a whole that can be taken in with the eye. Once inside the mountains, that coherence disappears. One ridge conceals another. A summit visible earlier vanishes. Distance becomes difficult to judge and the country is experienced in sections: the next bend, the next rise, the next stretch of broken track.The bicycle makes that change immediate. I am not transported through it. I feel the transition in the gradient, the surface, the temperature and the effort required to continue upwards. The ground demands concentration while the larger landscape repeatedly opens and closes around me.

There are occasions when I stop on that climb and look back towards the country from which I have come. The bicycle is still. Roads become lines. Settlements become small. Features that seemed substantial when I passed through them earlier merge into the larger structure of the landscape.

The distance travelled becomes visible in a way that it cannot while I am concentrating on the few metres of track immediately ahead.I stay there for a while.

Then I turn back towards the mountains and continue climbing.

The higher country changes the consequences of ordinary things. Weather matters more. Water matters more. Shade becomes scarce. Distance from settlement matters. A mechanical problem that would be an inconvenience close to a village has different implications high in the mountains. None of this needs to be dramatised; it is simply part of understanding where I am and behaving accordingly.

The Beehive climb and the climb from Anopoli represent different parts of my relationship with the Cretan mountains. The first leads through terrain where village life, pastoral use, woodland, shepherd tracks and wartime history intersect. The second carries me beyond much of the inhabited and cultivated landscape and into the high limestone country itself.

Neither, for me, is principally about reaching a summit. The passage through the ground is what matters. The climb is not merely the necessary effort required to reach somewhere higher. The changing vegetation, increasing distance from settlement, surface beneath the tyres, availability of water, changing weather, opening and closing views and physical scale of the country are not incidental details on the way to a destination. They are part of the knowledge acquired by moving through it.

When I descend and eventually return to the villages, the mountains I later see from the foothills are the same mountains, but I do not see them entirely from outside. I know something of the tracks that disappear into them and something of the country hidden beyond the ridges.

Over the years the bicycle has given me an unusually intimate means of making these connections. The island has gradually ceased to be a map containing separate locations. The spaces between those locations have become important, sometimes more important than the recognised sites themselves.

There is another kind of knowledge that comes only through repetition. I know places because I have been cold there. I know others because I have stopped beneath a tree in summer and been grateful for a few metres of shade. I remember where rain caught me, where a track proved unexpectedly difficult, where I stopped to photograph something, where I first noticed an old wall or building or inscription and wondered why it was there.

These are small memories, but together they create attachment.

There are also times when none of this is happening. There is no historical problem to solve, no object to investigate and no reason to stop beyond wanting to stop. Riding itself demands enough attention to push other concerns away. On difficult ground there is only the surface immediately ahead, the line through it, the bicycle beneath me and the next few metres.

At other times the terrain is easier and thought is allowed to wander. Ideas appear without being summoned. Something I have been reading returns to mind. A problem I had not consciously been considering arranges itself differently. Sometimes I return from a ride knowing what I want to write. Sometimes I return with nothing more than the satisfaction of having been out in the country.

Both are sufficient.

Much of my riding is shared, and that too has become part of my relationship with this landscape. There are regular companions, conversations, breakfast and coffee, and the accumulated memories that arise when people repeatedly cross the same ground together. A particular climb, descent, mechanical failure, soaking or wrong turning becomes attached to a place. The landscape gathers a small personal history alongside the much larger history already contained within it.

But solitude has its own importance. When riding alone there are long periods when the sounds are very simple: tyres against the surface, wind, my own breathing, insects, birds, perhaps dogs somewhere beyond a wall or bells from animals on a hillside. Then I stop the bicycle and its sounds disappear too.

There is a quality to that silence that I value greatly. It is not complete silence, of course. Landscapes are rarely silent when one actually listens to them. There is wind in vegetation, movement among insects, birds, livestock, sometimes water, sometimes a distant vehicle or a church bell carried farther than expected across open country. What disappears is much of the human noise that usually surrounds us.

I have no need to give this a medical explanation. I simply know its value.
At seventy-two, I am conscious that my relationship with the ground has changed because I have changed. I cannot ride as I did when I was younger, nor do I need to. The E-MTB extends my range and allows me to continue travelling through country that would otherwise become increasingly difficult to reach. I regard that as one of the great advantages of the machine.

What matters is that I am still going out, still climbing into the foothills, still following rough tracks, still seeing an unfamiliar turning leave a road I know and wondering where it goes. I am still stopping because something has caught my attention and still coming home with photographs and questions. Curiosity has not diminished with age.

The Lefka Ori remain the great presence beyond much of this. I do not need to be high among them for them to affect my understanding of the landscape. Much of my relationship with the mountains occurs below them, in the villages, foothills, ridges and valleys from which they are seen and towards which the country rises.

They provide scale, but they are never visually constant. Sometimes every summit seems sharply defined. At other times haze reduces the whole range to pale forms. Winter cloud removes them altogether, and then the cloud lifts and snow has appeared. In spring they can remain white above country already filled with flowers. In summer they stand pale above the dry foothills.

Their distance is deceptive. Move only a few kilometres and their relationship with the landscape changes completely. Drop into a valley and they disappear. Climb onto a ridge and they return. There are places where a particular summit becomes the dominant feature of the horizon and others, not far away, where it cannot be seen at all.

I have stopped the bicycle many times simply to look at them. Nothing needs to follow from that. There need be no photograph, no research and no story. I am looking at mountains, and after many years in Crete that remains sufficient.

A mountain seen from a road is one thing. Seen from a track beneath it, it becomes another. Climb onto its lower slopes and the relationship changes again. Enter a ravine and the mountain may disappear altogether, although I am now more completely inside its structure than when I could see the whole massif from a distance.

Scale is constantly being rearranged, and so is time. There are places where I ride through several periods of Cretan history within a few kilometres. A modern road crosses an older path. A concrete building stands beside a dry-stone wall. A small church occupies ground that has been used for centuries. A wartime position looks across terrain shaped long before the occupation. An archaeological site lies within a landscape still being cultivated.

History is not separate from the physical ground. People acted where they did because of water, gradient, visibility, concealment, soil, rock, distance and access. The landscape was not the background to their lives. It was one of the conditions of them.

That recognition has changed the way I read Crete. I no longer think principally in terms of places with empty country between them. The intervening ground matters. The climb from one village towards another matters. The saddle through which an old track passes matters. The spring matters. The apparently insignificant ridge matters. The wall beside the track matters, even when I do not yet know why it is there.

There will always be another track I have not taken, another path disappearing into the hills, another object beside the road whose purpose I do not understand, another story attached to ground I thought I knew. There will be places I have ridden through repeatedly without seeing what was in front of me.

Then perhaps, one morning, I will see it.
The bicycle will lean against a wall or lie beside the track while I look more closely. I may take a photograph. I may make a mental note of a name. When I return home I may open a map or take a book from the shelf, and the journey will continue in another form. Eventually the research may bring me back to the same place.

That movement between ground and thought, between riding and reading, between seeing something and wanting to understand it, has become part of my life in Crete. I do not think the parts can now be separated very easily, nor would I want them to be.

I do not regard the landscape as something to conquer. I have no interest in claiming a mountain because I have reached its summit or claiming knowledge of a place because I have crossed it many times. The longer I remain here, the less satisfactory such ideas seem.

What I possess is familiarity, and even that has limits. Crete continually demonstrates those limits. Winter rain changes a track I thought I knew. Spring vegetation reveals something I had missed. Summer strips the same ground back to stone. A document alters my understanding of a familiar ridge. An old photograph changes the way I look at a village. Someone tells me a story about a place I have passed for years without knowing what occurred there.

Then I return and look again.

Perhaps that is what my relationship with this landscape has become after all these years: not knowledge in the sense of having completed something, but an increasingly detailed familiarity accompanied by an awareness of what remains unseen.

Tomorrow, or the day after, I can leave Kokkino Chorio and enter familiar country once again. The track may be one I have ridden a hundred times. I will know the junctions, the climbs and the descents. I will know where the mountains should appear and where the view will close around me.

But there may be something I have not seen before.

To know a place is not to finish with it.

It is to return.