The church of St Michael the Archangel in Binarowa looks, from the outside, like a simple barn with a tower: dark shingled walls, a steep roof and a small onion-topped belfry. Step inside and the walls and ceiling explode with colour, covered with painted decoration of saints, scenes from the Bible and floral patterns, some of them centuries old. Built around 1500 of larch and fir, without nails in the traditional joinery, it is one of the Wooden Churches of Southern Małopolska, a group of Gothic churches inscribed as a World Heritage site. The local story is that it was built from timber left over from another church, but whatever its origins, the result is one of the finest wooden interiors in Poland.
The surroundings are the rolling foothills of the Low Beskids, the Beskid Niski, a landscape of meadows, woods and small villages that feels much more remote than its distance from Kraków suggests. Further south and east, the Orthodox and Greek Catholic wooden churches of the Lemkos, a Ruthenian people expelled from the region after the Second World War, dot the hills with their characteristic stepped roofs and domes, and many are also listed by UNESCO.
Biecz, a few kilometres away, is a small town with a big past. In the Middle Ages, it was an important royal town on the trade routes to Hungary, and it is sometimes called little Kraków for its town hall tower, churches and old houses. It also had a notorious reputation for its executioners. Gorlice, a little further on, was the scene of a major battle in 1915, when German and Austro-Hungarian forces broke through the Russian lines, and the area is dotted with the military cemeteries of the First World War. Nearby, at Bóbrka, the world's first oil mine was established in 1854 by Ignacy Łukasiewicz, inventor of the kerosene lamp, and it is now a museum.
The roads here are lovely: quiet, gently winding through the hills, with good surfaces on the main roads and some rougher stretches on the smaller ones. Watch out for horse carts and tractors. Biecz has fuel and a few restaurants, and Gorlice is a larger town with everything you need. Try pierogi in a village inn, and if you are lucky, a bowl of żurek, sour rye soup with sausage and egg.