Above the valley of the Someș Mare in Bistrița-Năsăud county, the hill called Dealul Podului carries the faint remains of a Roman watch post, one of a string of small installations that kept an eye on the northern edge of the province of Dacia. Like many points on this frontier, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2024, it is less a monument than a viewpoint with a story, a place where soldiers once scanned the horizon for movement in the free lands to the north. Today the horizon holds forested ridges, orchards and villages strung along the river.
Just to the west stands a ruin with a very different tale. The castle of Ciceu, above the village of Ciceu-Mihăiești, was for a time a possession of the princes of Moldavia inside Transylvania, granted to Stephen the Great in the late fifteenth century, which shows how tangled the politics of this region were. The castle was later destroyed, and only fragments remain on a volcanic hill, but the view is worth the climb. The Someș valley here is a broad, fertile corridor, used for millennia by people moving between the Transylvanian basin and the north.
The roads are a mixture: the main road along the Someș between Dej and Beclean is busy with trucks and fast traffic, while the side roads up into the hills are narrow, steep and rough, sometimes turning to gravel near the top. The villages are spread out along the roads, with traditional houses, wells and gardens, and you share the tarmac with carts, cattle and tractors. Spring brings blossom in the orchards, and early autumn the harvest, with colours deepening on the hills.
For a full tank and a choice of food, Dej, about fourteen kilometres away, is the obvious town, a former salt-mining centre with a fine Gothic Reformed church. Ciceu-Giurgești and the nearby villages have small shops. If you are hunting the actual frontier remains, a local farmer may well point the way, and a few words of Romanian, or Hungarian in some villages, go a long way.