Džbán

A white-marlstone plateau of deep woods and hop country between Rakovník, Louny and Slaný — a natural park nobody visits, which is the recommendation.

An hour and a quarter on the train from Prague puts you at Lužná u Rakovníka, and the plateau’s wooded edge starts almost at the platform. The walking is organized around the rim: climb through an edge village onto the flat top — two-thirds of it forest — cross it on quiet lanes, and come down the far slope into hop country, where the drying towers standing in for church spires feed the breweries of Krušovice and Žatec. Rail lines bracket the plateau on three sides, so a crossing is easy to design and easier still to shorten. Meeting another hiker up here counts as an event.

The walking is woods, ponds and half-empty villages: the beech stands around Kalivody and the country’s most beautiful beech near Mšecké Žehrovice, pond chains on the Loděnice, and settlements that have been losing people since the war — an honest, melancholy landscape at its best in autumn.