It was getting late, and the freeze from our wet socks and shoes would soon spread to the rest of our bodies. The red and white paint that showed the way along St Paul's trail through south-western Turkey - were hidden under a thick layer of snow that blanketed the valley we were hiking through.
The beauty of our surroundings comforted the fact that we were lost.
The sun was still bathing our faces in a life-affirming warmth as we stumbled upon a number of goat-herders’ cottages. We opened one. Simple, dilapidated, empty. A few pieces of plywood nailed together, as air-tight as a cheese grater. A home in the summer for a goat-herder or picker of wild oregano, but abandoned in the winter when the snow-line encroached.
It was exactly what we needed on this wintry evening: a floor with a roof, and a fireplace of stone. We scurried the surroundings in search of dry-ish wood and, with only an hour of daylight left, bunkered down for a night in the Anatolian mountains.
The St Paul Trail is the second of seven long-distance Culture Routes in Turkey, established by British women Kate Clow, who
