The green hills behind the Cinque Terre that nobody realises are handmade

Here is the Cinque Terre detail I cannot stop thinking about, and almost everyone misses it entirely. You come for the five little villages, all those sherbet-coloured houses tumbling down to the water, and you spend the whole day with your camera pointed at the sea. What hardly anyone does is turn round and look up. Because those soft green hills behind the towns are not a natural landscape at all. Every terrace on them was built by hand.

People started around the year 1000, prising sandstone out of the slope and stacking it into low walls with no mortar at all, just one stone balanced on the next, to make narrow shelves of soil they could plant with vines and olives and lemons. They have been at it, patching and rebuilding, for a thousand years since. Add all those walls together and you get something like six thousand seven hundred kilometres of dry stone, a figure people love to point out is longer than the Great Wall of China, and unlike the Great Wall it was built not by an empire but by ordinary farmers, quietly, a wall at a time.

I painted the terraces in watercolour and ink, the green shelves climbing up behind the coloured houses and the blue below, and the whole time I kept thinking about all those hands and all those centuries holding the hillside up. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  The Vineyard Terraces, Cinque Terre · Travel Poster