Matsuo Taisha and the Katsura river
The sake-brewers' shrine and its modern garden, then the river path north to Arashiyama. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Matsuo Taisha
One of Kyoto's oldest *jinja* (shrines), tied for fourteen centuries to *sake* and the brewers who still leave casks here. Walk in under the great *torii*; the wooded hill behind the hall is the original sacred ground.

2. The Shoyo-en gardens (Shigemori)
Three modern gardens by Mirei Shigemori, his last work — raised standing stones in dry gravel, set against an ancient shrine. A separate ticket and a strange, bracing thing: twentieth-century design speaking to a fourteen-hundred-year-old site.

3. Kamenoi spring
The 'turtle well' spring beside the shrine, whose water brewers have drawn for centuries to start their *sake*. Fill a cupped hand; it's why the whole place smells faintly of rice when the casks are open.

4. Katsura river embankment
Out of the shrine and east to the *Katsura*, then north along the flood embankment. Wide sky, the western hills on your left, herons in the shallows — the least-walked stretch of riverside in this part of the city.

5. Matsuo / Arashiyama riverside
Keep the river on your right as the hills close in. The Suntory whisky distillery sits off to the south-east of here; you're walking the watershed that made this corner of Kyoto a brewing town in the first place.

6. Hankyu Arashiyama riverside
The path delivers you to the south bank below the Togetsukyo, with Arashiyama's hills full ahead. End at Hankyu Arashiyama, a few minutes back from the water.

Matsuo Taisha and the Katsura river