Visit to the prehistoric man and the Devil's Slide

Itinerary

• We follow the K+ trail in the Hór Valley.
• We take a short detour on the KΩ trail to the Suba Cave, then descend back to the valley.
• Upon reaching the valley, we follow the PT trail to the left, which curves up to the Perpác Meadow, then turns down into the Mész Creek Valley.
• The PT trail leads back to Cserépfalu passing the Devil's Tower, the wine cellar row, the Millennium Lookout, and Little America.
• Arriving in Cserépfalu, we turn right onto Berezdalja Street and follow it to the first street corner.
• We turn left onto the S+ trail, which leads to the main street where the bus stop is also located (to the right).

Detailed description of the route

Gorge and prehistoric human cave in the Hór Valley

We start our hike from the Suba Cave Museum and Visitor Center, located beside the road between Cserépfalu and Bükkzsérc. The museum, complemented by a cultured restaurant, provides an introduction to the route, with its two rooms exhibiting the formation of volcanic rocks that make up the Bükkalja, the history of the stone culture related to tufa, and the role of the Neanderthal man discovered in the Suba Cave in evolution.

At the lower entrance of Hór Valley, we start along the K+ trail. Just a couple of hundred meters from the visitor center, we enter the national park area, the strictly protected Hór Valley Forest Reserve. Here you can discover a rich plant life in the rocky gorge and meadows on the hilltops, but collecting is prohibited to protect the environment. Soon after, a mining yard offers an opportunity to study the Triassic limestone, the main mass of the mountain range, as large gray blocks of stone lie scattered below a towering cliff. The limestone formed in the early Mesozoic era, about 220 million years ago, at the dawn of the age of dinosaurs, when the still unified supercontinent Pangea had a large oceanic bay. In the shallow marine environment, numerous calcareous animal remains were deposited, turned into rock, and built the material of the surrounding towering mountains.

After the mine, the valley narrows, the hillside becomes rocky, and at a trail sign, the KΩ trail branches off uphill through the rocky, steep karst forest. Here, you can read about Suba Cave's geology, history, and excavation, with a stone plaque depicting Neanderthal ancestors evoking the past. A rocky and steep path leads to a cave about 40 meters above us, with a railing to help climbing. At the end of the trail, an imposing cave entrance arches into the cliff. Although the passage in Suba Cave curves steeply to a dry-stacked wall, it is easy and worthwhile to climb on the dry clay floor because to the left of the stone wall, beyond a few rock steps, the through cave opens to the surface. The cave corridor is not large, only about a few tens of meters, but the site is definitely an interesting and exciting part of the Bükk mountain range. In the flat forecourt of Suba Cave, benches and a table offer a resting place.

From the valley to the hills

Returning to the valley floor from the cave, we continue a few hundred meters through the narrow gorge, passing a mine and several limestone mining bush pits, then cross an intermittent stream at the next nature trail sign. The streambed only fills with water during heavy rains; otherwise, the water sinks through cracks and karst cavities in the bed and flows underground. The trail sign shows pictures of higher water levels when muddy floodwaters surged through.

On the hillside on the other side, we briefly climb along the PT trail. Fortunately, we only have to cover about 40 meters of elevation gain to the hilltop, where we see a strange surface form at the dense forest edge: a saucer-shaped depression into which a ditch containing a rivulet flows; the water seems to disappear into the rocky bottom of the depression. This is a sinkhole formed at the boundary between the soluble karstic limestone and the less soluble sedimentary rocks.

The stream's source is just a few tens of meters away at the edge of a meadow on the hilltop, where a rock boundary also forces the water dripping in the cracks to the surface. The old tree-lined meadow is a great spot for picnics on good days, although there are no benches or tables.

Above the gorge in the forest

At the end of the wide meadow, the PT trail turns right and descends through a pine forest into the neighboring Mész Creek Valley. In the valley, we arrive at a small clearing with a monument decorated with figures of elves and forest animals, honoring the former foresters who worked in the area. We cross the creek on the S trail and then immediately turn right, where on the now hard-to-find PT trail we find more attractions.

Mész Creek is more active than the enchanting stream in Hór Valley, so it performs more spectacular work. Here, tufa rock is found at the surface, soft enough for the water to deeply saw into it, yet stable enough to form walls along the creek. This has formed a tufa gorge with walls 6-8 meters high, a few tens of meters long. When water levels are low, we can walk next to the creek, but the nature trail leads higher. The stone corridor with its vertical walls, small pools, and waterfalls is the most spectacular part of the hike; it’s worth exploring thoroughly and entering this geological fairy tale.

Stone culture at the foot of the mountains

At the end of the tufa gorge, the nature trail crosses a meadow, then in a sparse oak forest, we find the Devil's Tower, a few meters high tufa cone with some small cavities. It remains a mystery what the niches carved out in the tower were used for. One theory calls them beehive stones because they were partly worked towers, although they most likely served religious purposes as common formations in Bükkalja. The trail makes a big curve on the mountainside, behind which we reach the Devil's Slide, a washed soil, treeless tufa surface carved by water gullies.

We descend to the meadow, from where the edge of the village is only a few hundred meters away. In Cserépfalu, we first arrive at the wine cellar row – tables and benches are available here, but no year-round open catering can be expected. The easily carved rock found throughout the Eger wine region provided great opportunities to form underground storage chambers. Along the wine cellar row of Cserépfalu, there are imaginative carvings, cozy corners, and romantic spots.

If you still have the energy, it is worth climbing the stairs leading into the mountainside near Nótaaréna and following the PT trail a bit higher. Here you find cave dwellings and old cavities, and on the grassy hilltop an interesting stone tower with a spiral staircase. From the Millennium Lookout, you can enjoy a great view of most of the route so far, Cserépfalu, and the forested hills of Southern Bükk.

Stairs also lead down to the village from the lookout, but if you walk a little further, you can see the cave dwellings formerly called Little America, where people lived in cavities carved in soft rock until the 1960s. The name of this small basin settlement humorously refers to the fact that while the richest and most successful emigrated to America, the poorest only got as far as Little America. In any case, this housing form is also part of the stone culture typical of Bükkalja. Below the cave dwellings, the trail turns down to the village and turns right onto Berezdalja Street. At the first junction, we turn left onto the S+ trail, which leads out to the main street. The bus stop is on the right here.