Les falaises de Dingli et le Buskett : l'ouest sauvage

Ħad-Dingli is a working village of around three and a half thousand people, and most visitors see it through a bus window on the way to the cliffs, which is their mistake. Walk the square by the parish church of the Assumption: band club, kiosk, a shop or two: the last provisions before open country. On Sunday mornings it fills with mass-goers and lycra-clad cyclists negotiating over the same coffee. There is no monument to tick off here; the point is a Maltese village going about its business at over two hundred metres above the sea, with the smell of the fields where the streets run out.

Follow the cliff road south and the island ends in mid-air. The chapel of St Mary Magdalene (il-kappella tal-irdum, the chapel of the cliffs) stands a few strides from the drop, with the white radar dome the locals call il-Ballun (the ball) behind it. Below, look for the terraced fields stitched onto the ledges; families still farm them. Offshore sits Filfla, a crumb of an island the RAF used for target practice until 1971. It is a nature reserve now, by way of apology. This is the sunset seat of the whole country, and on a weekday evening you may share it with nobody but a kestrel.

On a bare limestone shelf above Buskett, dozens of parallel grooves run, cross and swerve like sidings outside a railway terminus, which is why the archaeologist David Trump nicknamed the place Clapham Junction. Some ruts are worn sixty centimetres deep. Stand in a pair and follow them with your eye: they converge, split and occasionally head somewhere that makes no sense at all. Nobody can tell you what vehicle made them, or when, and I respect the site for refusing to say. Almost everyone misses the second act: the fenced mouths of Għar il-Kbir, the great cave beside the ruts, where families were still living within a few generations of my own grandfather.

Il-Buskett (from the Italian boschetto, little wood) is the only sizeable woodland on an island that otherwise does shrubs. Aleppo pines above, then a valley floor of orange and lemon groves, olives and carob, with paths that actually smell of resin and damp earth. Sunday lunchtime it belongs to picnicking families and the smoke of barbecues; midweek you can have whole avenues to yourself. In late September, look up in the afternoons: migrating birds of prey funnel over Malta and come down to roost in these pines, and the birdwatchers with telescopes are generous with a look if you ask nicely.

From the Buskett paths the palace appears over the pines: a square keep with a tower at each corner, sitting in its dry moat like something out of a French print, which is roughly what Cassar was imitating. It is the summer residence of the President of Malta, so the closest you will get is the railings, and the classic photograph is from below, palace over the treetops in afternoon light. Once a year it opens for the August Moon Ball, a charity evening; otherwise, admire and move on. Through the gate you can make out the stables and attendants' quarters around the forecourt, added long after the keep.