This gorge has been formally declared a good place to write poems in. In the autumn of 2009 the local committee issued the Tenryukyo ginko declaration, ginko being the practice of walking somewhere and composing verse as you go. It promises the loan of a season-word almanac and writing materials, and a room for a poetry gathering. The valley is offered not as a view but as a desk.

Walk it and the claim makes sense. From Koyakyo bridge the trail crosses the Tsutsujibashi and comes back round in about an hour, between cliffs and standing rocks with maple and oak worked in among the pines. Colour gathers in the first half of November. The name is younger than the place: a Confucian scholar from Okayama gave it in 1847, and a Meiji calligrapher later picked ten views out of the rocks, beginning with the one he called the dragon's horn.

There are two ways to take the gorge. A walkway hangs under the road deck of the great bridge, so you cross the valley in the air and look down on the treetops. Boats run the river below, and from the water those trees are something you look up at. It is a small place, generous with angles.

Which is the point, if you have come to write. From above you get the shape of the valley; from the water you get its weight and its sound. Poets have been coming since the Edo period, and stone monuments along the path carry what some of them managed. Seventeen syllables. Choose your angle before the light goes.