The Banaue rice terraces are steps cut by hand into the near-vertical slopes of the Cordillera mountains of northern Luzon, in the Philippines, shored with stone and packed mud, climbing whole mountainsides from valley floor to ridgeline. They are almost always called two thousand years old. That number came from one scholar who assumed earthworks this size had to be ancient. Excavation now points to around 1600, when Ifugao families moved higher into these mountains to stay out of Spanish reach. So the steps are not an inheritance from some lost age. They are four centuries of cutting, walling and repair by the people still farming them. Each terrace is watered from a patch of forest kept uncut on the ridge above it, a clan woodlot called a muyong that can shelter more than 250 native plants. Carved wooden bulul figures sit in the granaries to guard the rice, and the sowing and reaping have their own music, the hudhud, chanted across the fields as the work goes on.
The walking is done on the walls. Narrow dikes of stone and mud thread between the paddies, and you go single file at the unhurried pace of the farmers who use them daily, water on one side and the drop on the other. At the roadside viewpoint above Banaue town you take your place in the cold early air, the valley below still packed with cloud that thins off the steps as the sun clears the ridge. The finest terraces are at Batad, an hour away and a walk in, where the tiers curve into a huge natural amphitheatre with a village cupped at the bottom. They carry on down to Tappiya Falls and a cold pool at the foot of the valley. The colour follows the rice: silver when the steps are flooded for planting, green as it grows, gold from floor to ridgeline near the June and July harvest. None of it is permanent. A wall nobody repairs slumps into the paddy below, so the terraces you see green are the ones somebody is still walking every day.