Hidden caves and a secret village...possibly

Unusual man-made cave hidden near the top of a small mountain - any guesses?

One of the great things about running in the hills is the unexpected, those little shocks to the illusory order imposed by our minds, the simplification and predictability we crave tickled into repositioning itself. No? That'll just be me then. The Yamashiro hills in Kyoto prefecture just north of Nara are modest and unassuming, but once you get into them, they have some refreshing surprises. I had been trying to find some new routes in this complex little area, but working out how it all fits together is not easy, and that makes for running fun. Trying to link up well used paths and starting and finishing points into good circuits means thrutching through some thick scrub on old hunters tracks, and sometimes loosing even those.

One of the more 'runnable' bits along a ridge

Taking an educated guess took me and my mate Richard down a steep hillside on a path that was probably made by wild boar, as it appeared from the goodly stink and a muddy wallow. After we had finished doing that we carried on. Luckily, just as the 'path' petered out, some unusual dry-stone embankments appeared in the woods, marked by red tape on twigs.

A long way from the nearest modern village up in the hills - there were lots of these

As we descended through a steep rough gorge more of these terraces appeared, some on the hillsides, and some apparently marking off flat areas. It felt to me that we had stumbled onto what used to be a hidden village, perhaps built at a time of war to hide from conflicts. If this was the case it was a good spot, as there was a water supply, and the bottom of the valley was protected by a rocky gorge, which though small, certainly wouldn't have looked to marauding soldiers as if there was anything up there worth plundering. As we stumbled out of the undergrowth, scratched but intrigued, and looked back, you would never know there was anything to see now.

Above this same area, coming from a different direction we happened across two caves at the base of a small sunken crag. I let Richard check out if there were sleeping bears in them first, it only seemed fair out of respect for his spirit of adventure, I'm very selfless that way. Each had been chiselled out and was big enough for two people to lie down in (or several to crouch in), and crude stone shelves had been carved out in each. Why were they made? Were they also hiding places, or were they graves? The chisel marks were quite sharp, so Richard wondered if they were WWII bomb shelters - yet we were far from any target, and the Americans deliberately spared Kyoto and Nara from the fire-bombs that destroyed most Japanese cities. Osaka is 40km away.

The second hidden cave

There is one man made cave about 10km away by a road, and in Saitama the Hiaku Anna (100 caves) are scattered across anentire craggy hillside. Yet no-one really knows what they were for either, though their guess of graves seems sensible  These caves were rougher and made in a hurry, but whether that was because of fear of an enemy, or the need for a local misanthropic boar hunter to bivouac regularly we'll probably never know. And I quite like it that way.

But what do you think we were looking at?