Japan
Tono
A folklore valley where kappa haunt the ponds and every farmhouse once stabled a horse.
The kappa might be real. In Tōno, a farming basin in Japan's Iwate Prefecture, water sprites, mountain spirits and shape-shifting foxes are not mythology — they are local history. Kunio Yanagita's 1910 collection The Legends of Tōno wrote the valley's stories down so carefully that it became one of the first books of Japanese folklore, and the landscape still looks like somewhere the stories could be true.
Tōno's folklore is inseparable from its landscape. Kappa — turtle-backed water sprites fond of cucumbers and, in the old tales, of children — have their own pond behind Jōkenji temple, where a local kappa-catcher fishes for them with cucumber bait, and a small shrine where women once prayed for milk. The valley's magariya farmhouses are built in an L, so that family and horses lived under one roof, and three folk villages keep them standing with their stables and storehouses. Tōno grows the hops that go into Japan's big-brand beers and its own Zumona craft ale, it holds one of the rare licences in Japan to brew doburoku, the cloudy home-style sake, and its idea of a barbecue is lamb on a helmet-shaped iron grill.
Solo
Cycling the folklore road alone — past the kappa pond, through rice paddies, around old farmhouses — is a journey into a Japan the guidebooks rarely reach.
Couple
The valley's quiet, its farmhouse architecture, and the oddness of its folklore create an atmosphere that bonds through shared strangeness.
- The valley's stories became Kunio Yanagita's The Legends of Tōno in 1910, one of the first collections of Japanese folktales.
- Kappa water sprites are taken half seriously here — a kappa pond, a kappa shrine, and a man who fishes for them with cucumbers.
- L-shaped magariya farmhouses kept family and horses under one roof, and three folk villages keep them standing.
- Tōno grows the hops in Japan's beer, brews its own craft ale, and holds a rare licence to make doburoku.
Jingisukan — lamb and vegetables seared on a helmet-shaped iron grill and dipped in sauce — Tōno's idea of a barbecue.
Doburoku, the cloudy farmhouse sake Tōno is legally allowed to brew, poured at farmhouse lodges in the autumn.
Isle of Lewis
Scotland
Standing stones older than Stonehenge, arranged in a cross nobody can explain, facing the sea.
Arvidsjaur
Sweden
A living Sámi church town of eighty timber huts beside lakes that test the world's cars.
Hermitage Castle
Scotland
The most sinister castle in Scotland squats alone on moorland that remembers its cruelty.
Haworth
England
Cobblestoned Brontë country where the wind still carries stories across the moor.
Sado Island
Japan
An exile island where gold miners, taiko drummers and crested ibis coexist in the fog.
Yoshino
Japan
Thirty thousand cherry trees blooming up a sacred mountain in pink tidal waves.
Narai-juku
Japan
A kilometre-long wooden post town where the street narrows until the Edo sky closes in.
Tsumago
Japan
A Nakasendō post town frozen in the Edo period where no wires cross the sky.