Ad Dakhiliyah

On the approach to the high country, a village of mudbrick and stone is built into the slope above a working palm oasis, and it is still entirely inhabited. Lanes run between the houses barely wide enough for two people, in places tunnelling underneath them; below, the terraces step down the hillside carrying date palms, bananas, limes and mangoes, all watered by an open channel that you can follow on foot from the point where it emerges. It is the most complete picture of pre-oil Omani settlement anyone can walk into, and it is not a museum: people live here, several houses take guests, and the request to dress modestly and keep out of doorways is a normal neighbourly one rather than a visitor rule. Go in the early morning or the late afternoon, when the light is in the terraces and the heat has gone out of the stone.

At the foot of the mountain road, Birkat al Mouz is a village in two halves. The new town is ordinary and busy; behind it the old quarter stands abandoned, its mudbrick houses open to the sky, its lanes silent, and its falaj still running clean water through the middle of the ruins and out into a palm plantation that is very much still worked. You can walk the channel from the old quarter into the plantation in twenty minutes and understand the entire economic logic of interior Oman on the way. Al Hamra, further west, is the same story at a different stage: a long terrace of tall mudbrick houses, some collapsing, some braced, a few restored as guesthouses or small museums, with a modern town spread out below. Neither is a ruin in the archaeological sense. They emptied within living memory, when oil money made concrete houses with air conditioning available and mud houses stopped being worth the annual maintenance they demand.

None of these villages would exist without the falaj. A channel is cut back into the rock until it meets groundwater, then run downhill at a very shallow gradient — sometimes for kilometres, sometimes tunnelled — until it reaches the settlement, where it passes first through the drinking-water section, then the washing places, then out to the terraces, and is divided between households in timed shares set by long-standing local arrangement. The system is old, still functioning, and recognised internationally as heritage. What makes it worth a visitor's attention is that it is not preserved behind glass: you will hear it under the walkways in Misfat, see it running through the ruins at Birkat al Mouz, and find the small stone sluices that shift the flow from one terrace to the next still being opened and closed by hand.

This is the best base for interior Oman, and the argument for two nights rather than one is that the region carries two completely different days. One is the monumental circuit — the old capital, the great mudbrick wall and the painted castle, all covered on the Nizwa and the interior forts guide. The other is the villages above, which want early or late light and an unhurried pace. Above both sits the high country, and the climb to it needs the right vehicle: the mountains guide explains what the checkpoint at the bottom of the road will and will not let through. Staying in a village guesthouse rather than on the highway is the difference between visiting the interior and being in it, and there are now enough of them in the old houses that it is an easy choice to make.