Nowa Słupia is a village that punches far above its weight in history, because it sits at the foot of the Holy Cross Mountains, the Góry Świętokrzyskie, among the oldest ranges in Europe. These hills are low, worn and wooded, rising to only a little over six hundred metres, but they have the dignity of age, with folds of rock dating back hundreds of millions of years. Beech and fir forest cover the slopes, and the road from the village climbs into them, with the smell of damp leaves and resin.
The village has a surprising claim: it was an ancient centre of iron-making. Archaeologists found thousands of smelting furnaces in the surrounding forest, dating back to the Roman period, when the local communities produced iron on a large scale, and each year in the summer the village hosts a festival in which people recreate the old smelting process in clay furnaces. There is a small museum of ancient metallurgy, and it is worth a short stop. The legend of the mountain, meanwhile, goes back further still, to pagan rituals on the summit before the arrival of Christianity.
Above the village stands the Benedictine abbey of Święty Krzyż, on Łysa Góra, the bald mountain, which holds what is said to be a relic of the True Cross. It has been a place of pilgrimage for centuries, and the buildings, though damaged by fire, war and neglect, still dominate the ridge. In the nineteenth century the monks were dispersed and the abbey was used as a prison, and in the Second World War it became a camp. Below the summit lies a field of huge quartzite boulders, the gołoborze, a rock river that formed in the last Ice Age and that you can walk over on a marked path.
The roads here are gentle but pleasant, with forest bends, farm lanes and village streets, and the surface is generally decent. Traffic is light, apart from pilgrims and walkers on summer weekends. Nowa Słupia has the basics, including small shops and places to eat, but not much else, and fuel is best done in Starachowice, eighteen kilometres away, a large town with all services. The village is quiet in winter, when the roads can be icy, and at its best in late spring and early autumn.