Trip to Černá Rokle

In the week, when it was sunny, I went to Černá Rokle (the "Black Gulley") near the small sleepy village of Kosoř not far from Radotín. As it turned out, it was a series of cliffs raised above a forest path; a dark wall of layered rock when seen from a distance but radiantly pale from up close. It could be an old quarry, taken over by the pale, light-filled pine trees and looked like something out of an old Western movie, saturated with bright white, high-pitched light, which had a clean almost antiseptic feel around it, tinged by a certain mystery. Around the fragmented boulders lay cream gravel; loose, cascade-nervous rocks. Sun-drenched pine trees stood at tension-filled distances on a scene yet only hinting at resin-fragrance (exuding what was like very faint menthol or a subliminal, rather exciting ozonic whisper). The pines were of that type with the roundish, rayed tufts of long needles. All of this exciting scene was redolent of aloness.I fantasised that I might be alone with the light and a single mosquito. If one is a bit careful, one can zig-zag up the cliff or rather a steep slope, and one comes up near Kosoř in a sort of thicket of dry whitish grass near a large brown field, soft as fecundity.

 

To get to the gulley in the first place, I walked from Radotín, taking the Zderaszká road up from town into the hills. You walk on the hot sidewalk by the road and after a few turns and kilometres find yourself on a shoulder above town. Going a little further you can see, on the right side of the road, a little grass-overgrown path going up into the woods. I decided to take it into the hills because the road was blazing and made far too concretely of asphalt to satisfy my spring-hunger properly; and as I found out, I would be well rewarded.

At first the path rises steeply for a couple of metres into pleasant woods, then you pass a small hut in a wide paddock or clearing, all green with delicious soft grass now, and then comes a forest graveyard, with only a couple of graves in one corner and the rest an somewhat down-at-heel fallow land. The one person whom I met during this part of the trip was here: he was an oldish man, loping along towards the graveyard, or maybe he was in some way involved with the chestnut horses grazing behind a screen of willows and firs next to the graveyard. He looked at me a little probingly, with narrowed eyes, or was I imagining it?

Here you come across a barrier across the road, which has a sign saying "Private Property", but also paradoxically enough a sign with the text "Pro pěší", which means "For Pedestrians", nailed to a tree just before it. I think the private sign refers to the graveyard or the stud farm  or ranch or whatever it is behind those trees. In any case it seemed possible to go ahead.

After a while of moving through the forest, all the brown trees forming a sort of festive, high canopy, you come to an unusual structure in the forest. It is a sort of horseshoe-shaped vale with steep sides covered in dry leaves and with one of those improbably shaped and lovely hills in the middle. The shape is like a bell, or a sort of mulch-covered illustration of a three dimensional parabola or other precise geometric concept. I know of another such hill near Karlík, which is near to Mořinka, though that one is much larger, this one is very small indeed, tiny even, one could say. Maybe this bell-shaped hill is quite typical for the Czech countryside, another related type can be found in abundance in the mountains of the České Středohoří (which seems to be called the Central Bohemian Uplands in English, that's the range between roughly Lovosice in the South and Ústí in the North).

There is a pleasantly spaced overgrowth of beech trees, so it looks a little like one is very small and walking through a giant scalp of thick straight, airy hair. This gives the forest a mixture of shade, cool and refreshing as water, and a light like the light of amber, or of church windows.

At this bell-shaped hill, the path splits towards the right and the left. The left seems a dead end but is interesting in its own right. Taking the right, you pass past a patterned black, green and magenta silk scarf someone has tied to a tree and into a trackless, lovely waste of a forest. This is pure nature, where the hills are languid and curvaceous like some sort of solidified waves. Walking over the leaves, you slide over troughs and over curved flanks. All around the long gray slender trees rest easy, their zebra-shadows patterning the floor of the forest in a patter of wavy lines and the endless foam of dried leaves crinkles underfoot. And all is clear and clean, so clean and alone; no-one is maybe within three kilometres of you on a good day.

I lay down there near the edge of the forest, in a deep dip in the topography, its wall behind me, the open field beyond, my body cushioned on the loam and the flimsy leaves, with flies pleasantly delecting some minute tit-bits on my arms, the almost scentless, clean smell of the forest was all around, the slight, nursing tang of the earth under my head, the sun filtering in through trees, which, it seems to me, is one of the most pleasant forms of getting your sun.

After lying there for a while the quiet hush of the forest, that sound without much sound transformed into secretive exclamations - the humming of an early bee, keeping away from me, interested in other things, my shifting in the leaves, the rush of the sun baking the air on the field, the alarm of a hawk, his strange, lonesome, beautiful cry. Though I can't remember its sound properly, I can remember something of its singing through me, like a totem, clear and profound like ice water, and seemingly wise. I set off, with the reward of the hawk's call, and the slight regret at not having seen him; man's maybe pretentious regret at the gulf between him and the animals, which he sees, rightly or wrongly, as purer than himself. Then one can walk further, across the humps and valleys of the forest but here already the soon-to-be-grain-bursting fields and the white spring sky and a pleasant, oblongish farm building on the horizon are visible from within the comfortable cover of trees.

The field here at the edge of the woods is soft and has the colour of milk chocolate and a texture comparable to heavy sand, so it is quite hard to walk on, and for this reason I walked along the line where the forest grasses and trees join with the field. In this way you come to a path leading left, amongst bushes, with a sort of very thick, leafy hedge on either side, and this leads directly up to the edge of the village of Kosoř with its bus-stop baking in the sunlight by a lovely large old buff-coloured ramshackle  building which may have been a barn, stable or storehouse.

If here at the barn you take a right turn, passing it and going through the village, you will see a yellow restaurant just after the barn and a board with information about the local sights, and then come to a kind of dip in the road, a crossing of the ways, a tight conglomeration of buildings, soon a red fence, and if one then veers off right here one will find a another little fast-dipping path going down into lush forest and following a stream of water. If you follow this, after a short while you come to Černá Rokle, which is to the left of the path. It flashes out white from between the trees.