It is a place of contrasts, wooded and farmed, but with a rugged east-facing coastline where you can watch the oil rigs being tugged in for servicing from the North Sea.
We were moving down a dirt track, in the rain, watching the villages roll past, a line of enticing, wooded mountains to the right, wondering where to stop to buy some food for lunch and chatting about what it would be like to be the children waving at us as we passed.
It would certainly be an incongruous scene for an energy boom, in the lightly wooded commuter belt countryside a few miles from Gatwick's perimeter, but with the flight paths pointing elsewhere, leaving the local horses and goats, even a field of llamas, to graze in peace.
Set above a wooded valley, this has the advantage of seclusion (at night you can play "spot the houselight"), while being a 20-minute walk downhill to the Old Ferry Inn at Bodinnick and a slap-up Sunday roast.
Once the slope was wooded and each village had only a few houses.
Unfortunately, the vast forests and wooded savannahs of west and central Africa, which harbour much of the continent's biodiversity, are less popular with tourists.
BEFORE they turn up on France's city streets or wooded parks, the women (and sometimes men) recruited into prostitution are "bought and sold, swapped, detained, raped and tortured, deceived, trafficked, despoiled".
Far from being a desert, the terrain consists largely of gently rolling grasslands interspersed with lightly wooded areas.
In this wooded valley at the foot of a forbidding mountain, there is no ecological challenge comparable to the acid rain that erodes cathedrals in Cologne and Cracow.Yet the 30 Serbian monks who man this 700-year-old redoubt face far more lethal dangers than that.
Wildflower meadows, wooded riverbanks and steep fields all attract cash.
More than 150 temples, pagodas and monasteries dot an idyllic landscape of lakes, rice paddy and wooded hills.
