forests

Eddie Howe was just a couple of days into an end-of-season break when the Newcastle head coach’s phone “exploded” last summer.

Sporting director Paul Mitchell had just announced that he was departing.

While there were initial tensions between the pair, Howe was the first to recognise that such a figure “protects the manager from a lot of things”.

That is why the arrival of Ross Wilson is so significant for Newcastle.

Rather than rushing into the appointment – despite the need for a sporting director during a draining transfer window – Newcastle have been keen to recruit the right person.

In Ross Wilson, who already has a good relationship with Howe, they feel they have that man.

It will fall to Wilson to help plot the medium to long-term strategy of the club.

And, after a period of boardroom upheaval, Newcastle will hope the Scot will stick around long enough to see that vision through.

We want to tell a single story but follow three separate crises. 

One began deep in Cross River National Park, where a reporter HumAngle worked with walked into the reserve and found neat rows of cocoa where there should have been rainforest in Nigeria’s South South. Another began hundreds of kilometres in the country’s North East, where families in Yusufari, Yobe State, were leaving their homes because sand had overtaken them. The last came from a file we had kept alive for years — the Great Green Wall, Africa’s 8,000-kilometre chain of trees planted to hold the desert back.

With rising interest in Nigeria’s environmental and climate crisis, HumAngle has drawn from its pioneering experience using geospatial investigative techniques to strengthen its reporting and also provide insights to other reporters who want to make sense of the data they gather. These tools and techniques became central to uncovering evidence from the aforementioned stories.

At first, they felt unrelated. One was about farms, another about migration, the third about a wall of trees. But as the maps were laid out, aligned on the satellite imagery, and compared with the testimonies of locals and experts in the field, the three began to move as one. Forests are collapsing in the south, deserts are pressing from the north, and the only defence is a broken wall.

Righteous deforestation

The first set of coordinates dropped us in the dense green. From above, the forest around Ekong/Oban town in Cross River State looked alive and whole. But zooming closer, the stylish spiral shapes of the tree canopies looked different from the bushy, round type of the natural rainforest tree crowns. Natural forest crowns scatter randomly, and the spirals reveal human hands. Cocoa.

“There are a lot of farms in the area, though, which have also sprung up in the same time period,” said Olatunji Olaigbe, the investigative reporter on the ground. “One thing we heard happens is that virgin forest is logged, and then the cocoa farmers plant on it after a while and claim farms have always been there.” 

Olatunji’s GPS confirmed it. He had stood among young cocoa trees where laws say there should be natural rainforest. In fact, he had walked more than one farm, and locals told him there were many like the ones he had seen. To verify, we scanned further and identified two large sites having these same tree crowns as the place where he was.

The first was within walking distance. It covers over 3,000 hectares, with scattered individual patches spreading loosely through the forest. The hypothesis was that they had no formal system of land allocation due to their unstructured organisation. Like a traditional tenure system, where the lands have no visual demarcating boundaries. Likely by villagers from the neighbouring communities. They may endure inherent land crises and disputes. If they did, it may not be apparent from a satellite perspective as the crops spread freely and uninterrupted over the National Reserve.

The second site, a few kilometres south of this site, looked more structured. Covering about 4000 hectares, it was orderly: consistent crops, obvious boundary markers. We suspected that this site may belong to a major entity invested in cocoa farming or a group of individuals and/or entities in agreement. Each owns one or multiple lands, perhaps allocated by an authority. 

We then measured how much forest had been lost. By overlaying the Hansen Global Forest Change data on two decades of Landsat imagery, the picture sharpened into a time-lapse of collapse. Between 2010 and 2015, degraded forests were thinned and gave way to deforested land. Stable forest shrank by more than two-thirds. By 2023, what remained of the true natural forest was buried in cultivation and cleared lands.

From above, the canopy still looked thick. But its function was gone. Rainforest exchanged for cocoa no longer serves the same way. 

We held on to the impression as we travelled through the country’s North. If Cross River had an abundance of crops at the expense of natural forest, Yusufari was stripped bare of both.

Across dying sands

In Yobe State, reporters spent some weeks travelling across villages surrounded by dunes, such as Yusufari and other villages and towns towards the Nigeria-Niger Republic border, including Bultu Briya, Zakkari, Tulo-Tulo, and Bula-Tura. 

When the photos got to the newsroom, the story was immediately obvious. Settlements, where locals were facing severe water shortages, sat on a bright sandy floor. In some communities, children walked kilometres to fetch water, and in some communities, residents packed up and migrated across the border.

We turned to satellite sensors to understand what was happening beneath the sandy surface. Data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission (2002 – 2017), which tracks the Earth’s shifting gravity to measure underground water storage, showed an odd pattern. Across much of the Sahel, from Zinder to northern Borno, Diffa-Yusufari region, and Southern Yobe, groundwater supplies had ticked upward. But Yusufari itself was an outlier: a flat line. No rise, no fall. A dead pulse for two decades.

The land was no better. ESA’s WorldCover maps showed degrading lands with surface water and arable land shrinking. Which is ironic because the land use satellite data we looked at shows that more than 12 per cent of Yobe’s territory is committed to cropland use, which is far higher than neighbouring Borno or Diffa. They were essentially farmers in a dying land unfit for farming. And so many of them decided to escape the advancing deserts. 

Another tool, NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Terra and Aqua satellites, helped us track changes in vegetation over the past two decades. The sensor’s record of greenness showed that villagers travelling into villages in the Niger Republic and Chad were not escaping the arid zone. Instead, the sand was on their heels, following them across the border. 

Holding on to that impression, we examined these environmental crises at both ends of the country. The crises looked different, but the outcome was similar: green was disappearing, whether through natural and man-made exploitation. 

In the South, the forest is being consumed under cultivation. Meanwhile, in the North, the soil was consumed until cultivation was impossible. Faced with crises like these, the question is always: what solutions exist?

One answer has been environmental laws that protect forest reserves meant to safeguard natural habitat, but as we have observed in Cross River, these laws are often ignored, with little or no deterrence against exploitation. Another idea was daring to match global-scale desertification with afforestation, hence the idea of the Green Wall. 

Launched in 2007, the Great Green Wall promised an 8,000-kilometre shield of vegetation across Africa’s midsection, as wide as a city. A living barrier meant to stop the desert from devouring soil and lives. But, nearly two decades later, what has actually grown is far more complicated.

The broken wall

Reporters who travelled across communities along the Wall’s route in the West African Sahel sent back coordinates that were less precise than in Cross River and Yobe states. Insecurity made movement almost impossible. Many sections of the Green Wall corridor remain under the control of violent non-state armed groups, with villages emptied by displacement.

So we turned to geospatial tools to fill in the gaps, and there was an unexpected paradox. Across the Wall, trees were thriving in those places people had abandoned, but dying in many of the places where people remained or fled to. 

To measure this, we cut the corridor into grids — manageable 18-by-18-kilometre boxes spanning thirty localities along the Great Green Wall, from Nigeria, Niger, into Burkina Faso, and beyond. We counted trees in 2007, then again in 2025, using high-resolution mosaics and classification models.

The aggregate number went up. From 3.1 million trees in 2007 to 3.9 million by 2025, a 26 per cent increase. But the growth was concentrated in deserted places.

Across communities in Isa, a local government area in Sokoto State, northwestern Nigeria, insurgency drove villagers away. With grazing and tree-felling halted, and seedlings planted years earlier left undisturbed, tree cover rebounded dramatically — from about 60,000 to nearly 300,000. Dense weeds may have contributed too.

A similar situation unfolded in Burkina Faso’s Djibo, where abandonment allowed trees to flourish. However, in Karma, Niger, tree cover collapsed by more than half.

These contrasting shifts underline the uneven fortunes of the Great Green Wall. Participating countries often report progress; for instance, some media reports say land and vegetation in Senegal and Ethiopia were restored, while Nigeria has claimed five million hectares of reclamation. Yet in rural economies like Yusufari in Yobe or Isa in Sokoto, realities on the ground tell a harsher story. Reporters found Green Wall sites littered with dead seedlings, left untended.

“When I went to Yusufari, I saw that the materials were there, as well as the seedlings, but nobody was taking care of the plants. You just see them dead as you pass by,” Mallam Usman, an environmental journalist, recounted. 

Since the 2010s, violent groups across Nigeria’s North West and the Sahel have threatened the Green Wall efforts, especially in villages abandoned by locals. Based on satellite observations, the Wall grew more in places where people could not stay. 

The legacy effect

To understand this, we probed further using open-source records of past Green Wall and related projects. A “legacy effect” became clear: seedlings sown years earlier, before villages were abandoned, had matured into trees. Our analysis identified at least eight initiatives across Nigeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso that may have laid this foundation. 

We observed the new greens, which are thinner trees with younger trunks and reach. It made sense that 10 to 18-year-old trees would grow within the period of our satellite measurements. 

However, for some of these places, like Isa, the growth of a few dense weeds in the abandoned areas was likely captured by the sensors despite their calibration for growing trees.

Table 1: Tree planting initiatives that may have been the legacies growing in deserted areas. 

Sources: Synthesis of OSINT research, human testimonies and land cover satellite data extraction.  Table: Mansir Muhammed/HumAngle 

Reporting the crisis 

But numbers and pixels tell only part of the story. Behind every satellite measurement lies a human landscape: communities displaced, farmers abandoning fields, and projects like the Great Green Wall that carry both promise and complication. Capturing this side is harder.

“Reaching the people at the centre of these crises is often difficult,” said Al’amin Umar, HumAngle’s climate reporter, whose work focuses on the human cost of climate change at the intersection of conflict and humanitarian crises.

Yet even as field reporting faces these limits, specialised sensors help trace what is otherwise hidden. We have tracked water stress, deforestation, and migration, with satellite technology detecting environmental markers that reveal unsettling conditions across these regions.

From South to North, the coordinates, the pixels, and testimonies say the same thing: the continent’s edges are eating toward the centre, and the centre — the very wall where we placed our hopes for resilience — is already too skewed to hold.

Field reporting: Ibrahim Adeyemi, Olatunji Olaigbe, Mallam Usman, Al’amin Umar, and Saduwo Banyawa. 

All code and data generated for these investigations are available in our open-source project repository.

‘Is there anything worth seeing in Latvia?” asked a bemused friend when I explained my destination. “Other than Riga?” Latvia’s capital is certainly worth a visit: a wonderland of perfectly preserved art nouveau architecture with a medieval centre of narrow cobbled streets and enough quirky museums to satisfy the most curious of visitors – most of whom just come for a weekend.

But a short drive or bus ride east of Riga lies another, more expansive and completely empty, wonderland: a wild, post-Soviet landscape of untouched forests, ecologically renowned wetlands, windblown beaches and crumbling castles. Not to mention the newly restored baronial estates where you can stay for the price of an average British B&B. This region, known as Kurzeme, is almost the size of Yorkshire (population: 5.5 million) but with a mere 240,000 inhabitants.

Kurzeme (also known by its German name, Courland) has 180 miles of undeveloped coastline and a good proportion of Latvia’s 1,200 castles and mansions, as well as the ancient valley of the Abava River, listed by World Monuments Watch as one of “100 endangered unique cultural monuments”.

It also boasts Kuldīga, a Unesco world heritage town, and Liepāja an upcoming European capital of culture (2027) – full of languishing art nouveau architecture, and enough former Soviet collective farms, KGB watch towers and military barracks to remind us that history really is just a breath away.

The Latvian bus system is excellent and extremely cheap but I rented a car for a few days to maximise my time. My tour began in Sabile, a town on the River Abava – whose crystalline, beaver-filled waters flow from Kandava to Kuldīga (Sabile is also home to several vineyards where Latvian wine can be tasted). Here, one misty cacophonous morning, I casually flipped open my Merlin birding app. Within minutes it had identified 25 birds including sedge warblers, golden orioles and spotted fly catchers and I had seen marsh harriers. Apparently such a wide variety is perfectly normal: Latvia’s bogs, wetlands, coastal lagoons and ancient forests (53% of the country is woodland while 5% is wetlands) make it one of northern Europe’s best birding sites.

Just a few minutes’ drive outside town is the Pedvāle Art Park, a 100-hectare nature reserve where storks pick their way through swathes of wild lupins and 195 contemporary sculptures from across the world. Founder Ojārs Feldbergs told me the Abava valley is home to 800 species of plant and animal, as well as crusader castles and Viking graves. “It was once a trading route for amber,” he tells me. “The Baltic Sea is the world’s richest source of Baltic gold, which was transported to St Petersburg and the east through this valley for centuries.”

Later, the bucolic beauty and clean waters of the Abava valley, along with its therapeutic sulphur springs, attracted hundreds of German aristocracy, giving the region a disproportionate number of baronial estates. Though these fell into disrepair during the Soviet era when they became collective farms, tractor houses and pig farms, in the past decade many have been painstakingly restored as boutique hotels.

At Kukšu Manor (guided tour €5), I gawped at lavishly painted ceilings and jaw-dropping frescoes. Here, for €185 for a double room, anyone can live, fleetingly, as a Baltic baron. Just north of the valley, I strolled in the walled gardens, vineyards and frescoed state rooms of Nurmuiža Castle and Spa, an elegantly restored estate where you can dip in a wild swimming lake as cranes and storks fly overhead, and double rooms cost from €80. Alternatively, at Padure Manor near Kuldīga, a reconstruction-in-progress often used for film sets, €40 will buy you a bedroom and access to the musty Soviet library that came with the house.

Kuldīga itself, a charmingly dusty town, became Unesco-protected in 2023, thanks to its 17th-century wooden architecture and striking location above Europe’s widest waterfall, the Venta Rapid – crossed via Europe’s longest brick road bridge. The high street – not a single chain store in sight – includes a needle museum, a renovated merchant’s house, and craft shops where I splashed out on handknitted socks for my kids.

At Pagrabiņš, which locals assured me served some of the best Latvian food in Kurzeme, I slurped delicious salty sour soup known as solyanka with a slice of Latvia’s famously dense, chewy rye bread. Afterwards, a 30-minute drive – including a stop-off at the pink, fairytale Ēdole Castle – took me to Jūrkalne, a pretty and utterly deserted beach of bluffs, dunes and pine trees. Pāvilosta, the latest hotspot beloved of Rigan hipsters, lies to the south: an old fishing village where you can grab a flat white (try Cafe Laiva) and watch the rolling Baltic surf or cycle the EuroVelo 13 coastal track to Liepāja.

It’s here, in Latvia’s third largest city that I end my trip. With its lush parks, sandy white beaches and strollable streets of gently decaying baroque and art nouveau buildings, Liepāja makes a great base for exploring the south-west corner of Kurzeme. I stayed in the historic Art Hotel Roma (doubles from €80 a night which includes access to the hotel’s art collection) and ate as often as I could at an exquisitely restored lodgings once frequented by Peter the Great: Madame Hoyer’s Guest House. Although it’s now a museum, the dining room operates much as it did in 1697.

But Liepāja’s greatest attraction must surely be Karosta, once one of the USSR’s largest submarine bases, and a closed military zone for nearly 50 years. Today, it’s a ghostly swill of pristine coastline, brutalist architecture and graffitied Soviet watch towers, with the gold-encrusted domes of the Russian Orthodox St Nicholas Naval Cathedral gleaming, surreally and extravagantly, from its midst.

To fully grasp Latvia’s extraordinary, violent history, I took a guided tour of Karosta prison, one of only a few former military jails in Europe open to visitors. Here, windowless cells once housed revolutionaries, miscreant soldiers and officers of the tsarist army, the Soviet army, the Latvian army, as well as deserters of the German Wehrmacht and “enemies” of Stalin – many of whom had used their metal buttons to scratch their initials into the concrete walls. A little unusually, Karosta prison offers all-night stays (ranging from €15-60 a night) for anyone not averse to paranormal activities – it’s been voted the most haunted place in the world by Ghost Hunters International. I opted, instead, for a recuperative beer from one of Liepāja’s burgeoning microbreweries, mulling over an intriguing part of the world, far from the usual tourist haunts.

The writer travelled independently using the extensive network of Kurzeme’s tourist information offices and with help from latvia.travel. For information on castle and manor house stays visit latvia.travel

There are no signs to the hot spring, but I locate it on the map and we drive to the end of the paved road. Overlooking the sea is a stone bench someone has dedicated to her parents, “with gratitude and love as deep as the Aegean”. My dad died recently and the words strike home. I’m glad my mum has joined me on this little adventure.

We walk down to the deserted cove at Agia Kyriaki thermal springs. There are old fishing shacks with stone-slab roofs, and shuttered cottages. Down an unmarked path, we find a rock pool where hot waters bubble gently from the sand, blending with the sea to a perfect temperature. Immersed in the healing mineral bath, I look up at juniper trees and blue sky, lulled by lapping waves and cicadas.

Ikaria, in the eastern Aegean – named after Icarus, the Greek mythological figure who flew too close to the sun – is known for its forests, springs and wine, communist leanings and longevity. Its population of about 8,000 is spread across dozens of scattered villages over 255 sq km, with few dedicated to tourism, and it only really gets busy in July and August. We arrive in mid-June from Kos (ferries also connect Samos and Athens to the port of Evdilos) at the port of Agios Kirykos and drive north-east to Faros, which has a mile of beach without a single hotel. The house we’ve rented for our first few days, Lighthouse Lodge, is perfectly located next to a cafe-bar and two tavernas – the hot spring a few kilometres away.

While Mum reads in the shade of a tamarisk tree on the beach in front of the house, I walk around the mastic- and thyme-covered cape to Drakano tower, with remains of fortifications from the fourth century BC. The lofty peak of Samos and the Fourni islands are the only features in an expanse of blue – the space and light are mesmerising.

A few Greek families with young children linger on Faros beach until dark. At Grigoris taverna, we eat grilled sardines and soufiko, summer vegetables cooked slowly in olive oil, and drink Ikarian red wine. Then we fall asleep to the sound of the waves.

The next day we explore the north of the cape, swimming in the clear turquoise waters of Iero bay, near the cave where legend has it that Dionysus was born.

Getting to Monokampi, a pretty village 15km inland from Agios Kirykos, and our base for the following two nights, requires negotiating the forest-covered Atheras mountain, which stretches in a 40km ridge across the full length of the island, rising to more than 1,000 metres. Our route zigzags up a vertiginous slope, cypresses poking up from the tangle of trees.

We’re late and I call George, owner of Moraitika Farmhouse, to say we’re on the mountain somewhere. “Ten kilometres in Ikaria are not like 10km anywhere else!” he laughs. When we arrive, George shows us around what was his great-grandmother’s farm, lovingly restored over 15 years. Three houses are now tourist accommodation, while the oldest one, from the 14th century, is like a museum to old Ikarian life, with a large fireplace for smoking meat, an inbuilt oven and a secret back door for escaping from pirate raids. A forest of arbutus (strawberry tree), oak, olive and ivy has grown over the once-cultivated terraces and the footpath his grandmother used to walk over the mountain.

In the evening on the terrace, as the sun descends over the sea, we eat local cheese with an organic dry white wine, Begleri – all picked up en route, as we’re a long drive from a taverna. Eleonora’s falcons swoop, an owl hoots and there are tiny, bright lights of glow-worms.

In the cool morning, birds sing their hearts out. We walk through Monokampi’s village square, dominated by a huge plane tree, and follow a sign to Agia Sofia, a hidden chapel built into a rocky spur. Mum points out honeysuckle and walnut trees, and we pick mulberries and plums.

The next day we descend to the coast and continue west, stopping at Karavostamo for a swim and fresh spinach pies from the bakery, then we drive on, looking for a place to stay for the next few nights. We stop above an impressive beach at Gialiskari, but there’s the thump of music from a bar so we keep going.

At Nas, we pull in at a taverna. After a lunch of courgette fritters, herby meatballs and homemade cheesecake with sea views, we think we might have found our place. We walk on until we spy a lush river canyon and a sparkling cove, and soon find rooms at Artemis Studio.

Steps lead down the rock to the bamboo-fringed estuary, where swallows and damselflies flit. The other bank is dominated by the walls of an ancient harbour and a ruined sanctuary for the worship of Artemis, protector of nature and wildlife. The waters flow from the deep, pine-covered Halari gorge, which extends several kilometres inland, with paths leading in various directions. The riverbed, with pink-flowering oleander and little waterfalls, fills with wild campers in mid-summer. For now, quiet reigns.

We quickly fall in love with Nas. Mum swims in the freshwater lagoon with the frogs; I swim in the sea, which is cold enough to leave my skin tingling. When the sun sets into the ocean, we settle on Artemis’s peaceful terrace for baked aubergine with kathoura cheese and red peppers, and goat roasted in olive oil and wine. The taverna is run by Thanasis, a musician who offers tours of his family’s organic farm, and Anna, who has a ceramics studio and shop, where we take our time choosing pretty jewellery.

After a breakfast of fresh juice, eggs and Ikarian smoked ham at nearby Reiki cafe, we head on to our next stop, in the village of Agios Polykarpos. We’re staying at Monopati Eco Stay, which has studios of stone, wood and bamboo, with large windows framing a magnificent view of blue sky, canyon and forest.

The owner says we will find his 87-year-old mother in the garden. Svelte and sprightly Popi, covered up against the sun, is thinning out her basil plants and beams at us. She shows us terraces filled with courgettes, sweet potatoes, aubergines and tomatoes. The next day she picks me apricots, shows me how to make basil pesto with walnuts and sunflower seeds, and tries teaching me to dance the ikariotiko, with a deep laugh when I mix up the steps.

Her philosophy is: good food, good thoughts and outdoor exercise. Every morning, she looks at the magic of nature and feels gratitude. “We only have one life – we must make the most of it.”

Mum and I feel that exact sentiment as we wave goodbye. We’ve made the most of our two weeks of discovery in Ikaria. We leave not only revived by good food and rest, but energised and inspired by the sweeping landscapes and time together, with precious memories to last a lifetime.

Lighthouse Lodge, Faros, from £105 a night (sleeps 4, minimum three nights); Moraitika Farmhouse, Monokampi, from £55 per house (sleeps 2-4); Artemis Studio, Nas, from £40 per studio (sleeps 2); Monopati Eco Stay, Agios Polykarpos, from £80 per studio (sleeps 4-6, minimum three nights)

Wales goalkeeping great Wayne Hennessey has retired from playing.

The 38-year-old’s career lasted almost two decades, during which he played 109 times for Wales – a national record in his position – and was part of the side that reached the semi-finals of Euro 2016.

Hennessey made his professional club debut in 2006 for Wolverhampton Wanderers, playing on loan for clubs including Bristol City, Stockport County and Yeovil Town, before permanent moves to Crystal Palace, Burnley and his final club Nottingham Forest.

“I have decided to bring my playing career to an end, I look back with gratitude and forward with optimism as I take the next steps on my footballing journey,” Hennessey said on social media.

More to follow.

Newcastle United have agreed a £55m fee with Nottingham Forest for Sweden winger Anthony Elanga.

Newcastle are seeking to strengthen their attacking options as they prepare for their return to the Champions League following a fifth-placed Premier League finish last season.

The 23-year-old scored six goals and produced 11 assists for Nuno Espirito Santo’s side during their successful 2024-25 Premier League season.

Newcastle have yet to pay a fee for a player this summer, with 18-year-old Spanish winger Antonio Cordero the only new arrival on a free transfer from Malaga.

Forest are believed to have paid £15m to sign Elanga from Manchester United on a five-year-deal in 2023.

He had arrived at Old Trafford at the age of 12 and made 55 appearances before moving to the City Ground.

As we sauntered along sun-splashed woodland paths, our knowledgable guide Michael started to explain the links between the local geology and flora. The unusually luminous light green leaves of the beech trees? “That’s due to the lack of magnesium in the chalky soil.” The 18 species of wild orchid that grow here? “That’s the high calcium content. You see? Everything is connected.”

That’s a phrase my companion and I kept hearing at Møns Klint on the Danish island of Møn. This four-mile (6km) stretch of chalk cliffs and hills topped by a 700-hectare (1,730-acre) forest was fashioned by huge glaciers during the last ice age, creating a unique landscape. In 2026, a Unesco committee will decide whether Møns Klint (“the cliffs of Møn”) should be awarded world heritage site status, safeguarding it for future generations.

Using Interrail passes, we took the train from London to Vordingborg (Møn’s nearest railway station) via the Eurostar, with overnight breaks in Cologne going out and Odense, Denmark’s third-largest city, coming back. There’s an efficient bus service both from Vordingborg station to Møn (over an impressive bridge) and on the island itself but, for maximum flexibility, we hired electric bikes in Stege. About 12 miles from Møns Klint, Stege has been Møn’s main town since early medieval times. Home to impressive ancient ramparts and a bijou museum, it’s a good place to stock up since most of the island’s shops are found on the winding high street.

One wind-and-battery-assisted pedal to Møns Klint later and Michael was taking us about 500 steps down to the beach, the scene of cliff collapses so immense that the spoil sometimes forms peninsulas sticking out a quarter of a mile into the sea. Besides being a cartographer’s nightmare, the slowly dissolving chalk also turns the water by the shore a milky white, giving it a distinctly Mediterranean flavour. Almost every stone we picked up was a 30m-year-old fossil of some sort – Michael identified squid, sea sponges, sea urchins and oysters.

Another day we spent meandering along Klintekongens Rige, the longest of Møns Klint’s nine waymarked footpaths. The nine-mile circular trail sent us up and down and up and down through the forest; into the 18th-century “romantic gardens” of Liselund, where the bass-heavy croaking of glistening frogs contrasted with soprano peacocks; and down to a long stretch of beach for a mini adventure clambering over fallen trees and mounds of tumbled rock while the Baltic Sea lapped almost up to the cliff face.

When the sun went down we met up with night-time guide Susanne, who walked us into the darkened forest and interpreted the cries of tawny owls and scampering noises in the undergrowth (the owls’ potential dinner). The islands of Møn and Nyord form Scandinavia’s first Dark Sky Park, so we were able to gaze up at a panoply of stars while Susanne made us one of the tastiest gin and tonics we’d ever drunk, with mint from her garden and a wild rose syrup from petals she’d foraged that day.

The next morning, we explored the area’s mountain bike trails with Uffe, a guide, like Michael, from the GeoCenter, the local interpretive museum (where an exhibition on biodiversity is appropriately called “Everything is connected”). Along the way, he pointed out splendid displays of lady orchids and a herd of goats whose grazing improves biodiversity. Then, having barely broken a sweat, we suddenly found ourselves out of the woods and atop Denmark’s eighth-highest peak. Aborrebjerg is a humble 143m high, but still provided us with panoramic views across Møn and the shimmering sea. Later, we took to the water on a paddleboarding tour from the village of Klintholm Havn with Kesia from Møn Surf, appreciating the grandeur of the mighty chalk cliffs from another angle.

At night, we slept in a modern and stylish apartment at the nearby Villa Huno – an eco-build with a living roof and a view over a peaceful lake. We strolled around it one evening, stumbling across a woodpecker guarding the remains of a medieval fort, before enjoying a tasty dinner in Koral, Villa Huno’s summer-only restaurant. After a couple of nights we switched to a well-appointed bell tent next door at Camp Møns Klint. Then, as a base for exploring the island of Møn further, we pedalled west to Ellevilde boutique hotel. New owners Kirstine and Kenneth recently moved down from Copenhagen, leaving their highly regarded Restaurant 56 Degrees. Kenneth’s small plates blew us away – imagine a Danish Ottolenghi – with many ingredients from the garden or neighbouring farms. The sweet pickled onion and rhubarb salad, and the wonderfully crisp herby flat breads that accompanied a gazpacho, will live long in the memory.

Møns Klint represents a mere sliver of the island of Møn, so we spent our last day exploring its mostly flat countryside on our electric bikes. A cycle path runs parallel to the island’s main road, and all the smaller roads we used were essentially car-free, which made for a very relaxing experience. We raced hares along hedges; marvelled at some wonderfully eccentric medieval frescos in Elmelunde church; bought ceramics from a friendly potter called Jacob; and stopped off at little flea markets in islanders’ front gardens.

Crossing the wind-blown bridge on to the tiny island of Nyord (population 35), we watched lapwings at play and visited Denmark’s smallest museum. Not much larger than a telephone kiosk, it is a former lookout shelter that tells the stories of those who guided boats through the perilous straits nearby.

In Nyord’s only village, also Nyord, we dropped into Noorbohandelen for some rum mustard, one of the many flavoured varieties that are a local speciality. We admired their aesthetically satisfying shelves of bottles filled with all manner of colourful spirits made on the premises, before lunching alfresco at their cafe on a correspondingly colourful salad, as swallows tore joyfully about the sky above our heads.

The trip was provided by southzealand-mon.com, with travel provided by Interrail. An Interrail Global Pass for 4 days travel within a month costs £241 adults, £217 seniors, £180 12-27s, 4-11s free with an adult. Villa Huno has apartments from £145 a night. Camp Møns Klint has tent pitches with electricity from £40 a night. Ellevilde boutique hotel has doubles from £119 a night