Let’s get that tricky pronunciation out of the way first. Xemxija is pronounced ‘shem-she-ya’. X’s and Q’s are just thrown into place-names in Malta to confuse the foreigners. The town is in the North of the island, just next to St Paul’s Bay, so buses 11, 37, 41, 42, 49, 221, 222, 250 and X1 will all get you there.
Malta is a small and massively overcrowded country, so from time to time you may yearn for proximity with nature and open spaces. You may also feel that all this restaurant food and cheap wine is not doing much for your waistline. So to kill two birds with one stone, I recommend you take a morning to go and wander along the Xemxija Heritage Trail. There is a little bit of uphill to negotiate, and some scrabbly ground underfoot, but it’s a nice little walk and you are tripping over ancient history at every turn. Here are just a few of the sights to be seen:
Roman Road:
So what were you expecting, the Appian Way? Considering people have been tramping along this road for the past two thousand years, it’s really in surprisingly decent shape, especially at the edges. The ancient Romans used roads like this to transport salt and farm produce around the place, and this also forms part of the route taken by pilgrims on the way to Mellieha to worship at the shrine to Our Lady. You can see crosses carved into the rock walls where generations of pilgrims have made their mark.
Burial Cave:
There are other caves in the area in which people lived, but this particular one was for those who had passed from the land of the living. It is believed that this cave dates back to prehistoric times, before the front wall collapsed to give us the view above. Previously the only way to get inside was via steps hewn out of the rock around the other side.
Cart Ruts:
Nobody seems to know exactly who or what created these grooves out of the rock. Personally I think it is safe to assume that they were lasered into the stone by the alien race which inhabited the (now sadly lost) city of Atlantis, and used Malta as a throughway. Less plausible theories are also in circulation.
Apiary:
An apiary is a place where bees are kept, by the way, just in case you thought you were looking at a picture of some sort of monkey prison. Anyway, here we are in the 21st century, candy coming out of our ears, and people still love honey. So just imagine how prized it was back in Roman times, when a fig was just about the last word in sweet-toothed treats. Presumably this apiary was a tightly-guarded place in those days.
These are only a few of the sites you can visit on the trail. Others include Roman baths, a troglodyte cave, neolithic tombs, and plenty more. It’s a nice way to stimulate your body and your brain, if you have been spending too much of your time in Malta laying on beaches reading Danielle Steele novels.
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Seems that most people comment but know nothing, they call them cart ruts but they are to be found all over the island, on land and in the sea, and to be honest I doubt if in those days were any wheels, rope just assume, neolithic, Roman, prehistoric, man nonsense…. You are talking thousands of years here.