Jeremy Seal finds a classic Turkey of limestone and lion's milk on the Lycian way.

Kate Clow thinks of everything.
It's a reassuring talent in a walking guide, especially one leading an assorted bunch of striders and slackers across 150 miles of near-virgin Turkish hill country. But throughout our trek among the limestone crags of the Bey Mountains, Kate kept surprising us with some miracle or foresight.

'Make sure you pick some wild oregano on your way to camp' she instructed, as we trudged manfully towards the day's final hillside. Heaven forbid that an end of trail supper should go ungarnished.

It was early October and the still smouldering embers of the hottest summer in years, the Lycian Way was proving beautiful but strenuous - the contours closely packed, the watering holes rather less so. This is Turkey's only long-distance walking trail, created by Kate herself. Now she shows off her handiwork to walkers on a 15-day trekking holiday, supported by a baggage bus, a cook-cum -driver named Omer, and camping and comfortable pansiyon stays between stages.

Clow and her faithful billhook have spent years clearing the scrub from ancient Roman rods and mule trails of pilgrims and miners, invaders and shepherds. A Turkish resident since 1989, she has stitched them into a 300 mile trail between Antalya and Fethiye which switches alluringly between high pastures and shoreside villages, historical ruins and mountain summits.

We laced our boots at Kemer - a scruffy concrete resort - and retreated gratefully into the hinterland through a rising forest of pine and smokebush, myrtle and wild pistachio. Pink cyclamen grew among the fallen pine needles, and the open slopes had been slow basted all summer in sage and thyme.
We came to a river that stepped down a steep gorge, gathering in chilly pools where we swam among egg-smooth boulders. We picnicked on bread and beyaz peynir (Turkish feta), followed by dried apricots, mulberries and slabs of sesame-tasting halvah.

We trailed into camp that afternoon smelling of sweat and crushed oregano. The tents had been pitched on a bare plateau fringed by neglected fruit trees, abandoned cottages and a single modern construction - part house, part building site. Its owner sat on his incomplete verandah, a baseball cap slewed across eyes that stared unsteadily down the gorge to the distant Mediterranean.

He invited us to share his raki, the ferociously disabling liqueur that the Turks know as lion's milk, but we were quicker to accept his second offer - the use of his shower. It's at times like this, when hospitality extends far beyond the statutary glass of tea, that Turkey tots up brownie points as a walker's dream.
As I awaited my turn in the bathroom, Nadir chatted. "I was a boat captain at Kemer," he explained between aniseed flavoured hiccups. "but I wanted to get back to the mountains, to my father's land. I have big plans here.'

Back at camp, grapevines grew wild, sagging from holm oaks like ruby cobwebs. After our campfire dinner of pilic shish - barbecued chicken with oregano - we secured our sweet course with the help of Kate's billhook, dodging disturbed hornet as we snagged high bunches.

The next morning, we passed through landscapes shorn of inhabitants. They have made new lives at coastal resorts, with only Captain Nadir taking their place. A farm building had fallen to its timber knees, spilling the gourds formerly used for water carrying from its attic store. The design conscious amongst us nabbed a couple as lamp bases. The raised wooden platforms or divans, once cofortable al fresco meeting places, were now decrepit and overgrown with scrub oak.

We stopped to swim with fluorescent green frogs in a convenient water tank before descending to Gedelme, where a convoy of tourist 4WD's roared past. But in the quiet village beyond the main road, where the air smelt of hay and the swept track was carpeted with cracked wheat and sliced apples drying in the sun, unchanged rural Turkey was hunkering down for the winter.

We were billeted that night at Yayla Kuzdere, the last village before the mountain, in a farmstead surrounded by orchards laden with quinces and pomegranates. Only a makeshift barricade kept the goats, sheep and chickens from our simple dormitory quarters.

Elderly Ayse, hands stained dark with the juice from a thousand walnuts, bustled about swatting moths as we fell upon her excellent tazefasulye, a stew of garden beans. In this enchanted gloaming, Mehmet Ali, beset by bills and blood pressure, told us of his own dreams - to sell up and move to the coast at the first opportunity.

We breakfasted on black tea and sigara borek, crumbly cheese and chives deep-fried into rolls of filo pastry, before climbing through stands of verdigris coloured cedars. The next morning, we reached the summit of the 7550ft Tahtali Mountain, and the world lay below us. Far inland, to the northwest, the trees gave way to dust as a green tide line on the Bey Mountains, while below us the sea lapped at the antique harbours of Phaselis.

Descending, we yomped past the Chimaera - the fabled flaming hillside known to the ancients as the home of a fire breathing dragon, and to modern science as an atmospheric quirk caused by a cocktail of rising gases, At the soporific coastal village of Cirali, a day's reuperation awaited us. We paused only to sling wet washing from the orange trees in the garden of our pansiyon before cooling off in the nearby Mediterranean.

But the beach did not hold me for long. I walked to its end where a river led inland, its path lit by azure flashes from kingfishers. The sun was obscured by a canopy of figs and laurels shedding dead leaves with a dry crackle, and I was soon among the half-lit ruins of Olympos - temples and theatres, tombs and aqueducts. It is classical Turkey's most creepily evocative site. I was losing myself in this explorer's heaven when I ran into one of my fellow walkers. 'I tried lying on the beach" he told me, 'But I kept thinking of all these things to see. Do you think they'll mind if we go walking on our day off tomorrow? '

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