Of course we had to go to Boggy Ditch! The name compels visitors, even if it is a tad misleading. Nobody who goes to Boggy Ditch leaves disappointed, though.

The village lies on the Kel Afon, pretty much equal distance from Oes and our final destination, Tor Calon.

We visited Oes first and then moved on to Boggy Ditch, but many people use the village as a good base from which to explore the forest.

You approach it along a muddy track, which abruptly drops off in to what, to my inexpert eye, looks like a swamp. A vast sunken squelchy terrain, filled with still brown pools and soggy clumps of bracken, which smells of earth and decaying vegetables. Boggy Ditch sits above this swamp (which Felix’s The Living Forests insists is not a swamp but a complex freshwater wetland).

A damp wooden bridge connects the “mainland” to the village. There are a few of these at various entry points, and only one is wide enough to accommodate anything larger than a bicycle. The one we used is very narrow, with no handrails, and I was in constant fear of falling into the brown ooze below. Reader, you will be relieved to know that we managed to safely cross.

The village of Boggy Ditch is made up of wooden buildings that sit on stilts: long poles driven deep into the pools below. Elevated walkways (mostly damp and often wobbly) criss cross the village, connecting the wooden buildings.

The Wild Gift feels as though it has been reclaimed by nature, and humans are no longer welcome; but in Boggy Ditch it feels like humans and nature co-exist in something close to harmony. As you carefully walk along the creaking planks of the walkways you feel like you’re in a secret world – maybe the same world that Oes occupies.

The views from the walkways are frankly surreal. The bogs are often obscured by a mist (which seems to exude from the surrounding dampness), as though Boggy Ditch has its own unique micro climate (again, like Oes). The mist drifts around the elevated buildings and the deep still dark pools below.

The thing I love most about the buildings is their roofs – they’re made of moss! Thick, spongy moss that acts as insulation. It just adds to the overall strangeness: like you are on an alien world, in a lush forest of tall, misshapen trees.

There are a couple of large buildings on the outskirts of the village which act as visitor hostels. It’s all very basic: each room has stripped wooden floors and walls, and there were live green shoots growing out of the walls of the room we stayed in. It is mostly dry, but I would still recommend bringing a few jumpers, especially if you come in autumn or winter, as there is a constant draft. Each room has five or six beds, and a large en suite. There is a shared kitchen and living area on the lowest floor. Massive glass windows look out over the mossy roofs and the bogs.

The one night we stayed was the quietest night if my life. There are no motorised vehicles in Boggy Ditch, none of the street noise of other villages and towns. Just the constant soft water noises from the pools and the bogs: the slurpings, sloshings and burblings. And the wildlife! Most visitors to Boggy Ditch are birdwatchers – and they certainly get their money’s worth. There are so many birds swooping everywhere, nesting in the roofs of buildings, paddling in the dark peat pools. They disappear at night, leaving the sky free for the bats.

We were so lucky to get a clear night, and the stars filled the sky. That was jaw-dropping in and of itself, but then the bats flew in. Everyone came out on to the walkways as they zipped all around us, diving and turning, suddenly changing direction to zoom off again. I tried many times to track the flight path of a single bat, but it always twisted away and I lost sight of it.

What a memorable stay. Boggy Ditch and the Forest of Oes appear on all maps of Farynshire, but I’m still convinced that they are really another world, a strange and beautiful fantasy world.

We had to re-join the real world the following day, to continue our journey, the final leg.

By Mabel Govitt