Bug River Valley

The Bug runs about eight hundred kilometres and, along its lower Polish course, it has never been straightened, dredged or embanked to any significant degree - which makes it one of the few large European rivers still doing what rivers do: meandering freely across a floodplain a couple of kilometres wide, cutting new channels, abandoning old ones as oxbows, building sandbanks and eroding bluffs, and flooding annually. The ecological result is a corridor of enormous value, with sandbank-nesting birds including little tern and common sandpiper, beaver and otter, and one of the more important bird areas in the country. Along it are small towns with a mixed heritage - Drohiczyn with its churches on a bluff, wooden villages, Orthodox and Catholic parishes side by side - and Podlasie country behind. It is a kayak river and a slow driving route, and it carries very little tourism.

What you actually see

• An unregulated river - meandering, cutting and abandoning channels as rivers used to.
• Sandbanks and oxbows - the landforms a free river builds, with nesting birds on them.
• Bluff towns - Drohiczyn and others above the floodplain, with mixed church traditions.
• Very little tourism - a long quiet corridor along the eastern border.

When to go

April to June and September. Two to three days.

Honest expectations

Access to the water is limited and roads run some way back from it in places. Mosquitoes on the floodplain are severe in summer. It is a border river with an official presence in places; carry documents. Services along it are sparse.

Nearby

Drohiczyn and Podlasie are north-east; Warsaw is west.