Somebody had to notice them first.
How a limestone ridge above Douma turned into three stone houses, and what the mountain was doing for the eighteen centuries before that.
The rock came first.
This ridge is Jurassic limestone, laid down as seabed and lifted into a mountain, then worked on by rain for a very long time. Limestone dissolves slowly in slightly acidic water, which is what rain is. It finds the weak seams, freezes in them each winter, widens them each spring.
Given enough of that, you get caves, sinkholes, and the kind of deep sculpted hollows this whole plateau is covered in. Occasionally you also get a shape the human eye refuses to read as anything but a face.
Here you get two. One looks west into the sunset. The other is turned slightly inward, as though it is listening to the first. Nobody carved them and nobody is entirely sure who noticed them first, though everyone in the village has a candidate.
An emperor owned this forest.
The most remarkable thing about this mountain is documented, unique in the world, and almost nobody knows about it.
By the second century Rome had been cutting Lebanese cedar and fir for three hundred years. The timber built fleets, and the fleets were the empire. By the time Hadrian came to the throne in AD 117 there was not enough good wood left on the mountain to keep it up.
So he took what remained. Boundary markers were cut directly into the limestone across northern Mount Lebanon, roughly two hundred of which have been found, at altitudes between 270 and 2,311 metres. Most carry the same four abbreviated words:
IMP HAD AVG DFS
Boundary of the forests of the Emperor Hadrian Augustus
They are catalogued as IGLS 5001 to 5187. Ernest Renan identified the first of them in the nineteenth century, and Hani Abdul-Nour found more than twenty new ones in the 2000s. People are still finding them.
Nothing like them survives anywhere else in the Roman empire. Mount Lebanon holds the only surviving imperial forest boundary in the Roman world, which makes it, among other things, one of the earliest recorded attempts at conservation by a state.
The village below has its own piece of the record. A sarcophagus found at Douma carries a Greek inscription for a man named Castor, who died in AD 317. It is the oldest name anyone here can put to this valley.
About the markers on our trails
The small signs set along the paths across the property are ours. They point to what the mountain has kept: where the old terrace walls run, which species were counted as imperial, how far the boundary is thought to have reached from here.
We have not found a Hadrianic inscription on this land, and we are not going to claim one. The letters Rome cut are out there on this mountain. Ours point toward them.
Why a Lebanese mountain has a French name.
Look at Douma from the road above it and the first thing you see is the roofs, all of them the same red. Those tiles were pressed outside Marseille. They started arriving in the second half of the nineteenth century, carried east on the trade that took Mount Lebanon's silk west, and they replaced flat earth roofs across the mountain within a couple of generations. The village you photograph today is a Lebanese village wearing a French roof, and it has been for about a hundred and fifty years.
The language arrived on the same current and stayed longer. France governed Lebanon under a League of Nations mandate from 1920 until independence in 1943. Arabic is the country's official language and always was; French never left it either. It is on the shop fronts in Douma, in the schools, and in the half of a sentence people switch into without noticing.
So a French name here is not an affectation borrowed from somewhere more fashionable. It is the same borrowing the roofs made, and Douma has been living comfortably with that one since before anyone alive was born.
And cap?
Cap is the French for a headland: the point where high ground stops pretending and runs out into the air. It comes from the Latin caput, a head, which is also where English gets capital, captain and chapter. A cap is the head of the land. Whatever is behind it ends there.
That is the shape this ridge makes. The limestone runs level for a while and then turns and stands out over the valley, and the three houses are cut into the last of it, under the overhang, where the rock takes the rain and keeps the temperature slow. There is no roof on the skyline to see. You do not put a roof on a cave.
Cap de Douma. The headland above Douma, and the two faces weathered into its edge.
The property traded as Naseem Douma until 2026, and as Rock Yard before that. Same ridge, same faces, same three houses.
What we built, and what we left alone.
The houses are built against and into the rock, using stone cut on site and walnut from the valley. Nothing was blasted. La Grotta follows a hollow that was already there; we squared two walls and left the other three as we found them.
The lawn is the only thing here that is not local, and it exists because there was no flat ground and people wanted somewhere to sit. The olive grove below was already old when the property changed hands.
We stopped at three houses. There is room for six. Six would ruin it.
About the name, and the ones before it.
Cap is the French word for a headland, from the Latin caput, a head. The three houses are cut into the last of a limestone ridge, where it turns and stands out over the valley, so the name reads as the headland above Douma. Douma is the village below, in the Batroun District of northern Lebanon.
Because Douma is already part French and has been for about a hundred and fifty years. The red tiles on the village roofs were made outside Marseille and came east on the nineteenth century silk trade, and France governed Lebanon under a League of Nations mandate from 1920 until independence in 1943, which left the language in everyday use. Arabic is Lebanon's official language. French is simply also spoken here.
Yes. It traded as Naseem Douma until 2026, and as Rock Yard before that. It is the same property, the same owners and the same three houses on the same ridge above Douma. Only the name changed.
On the ridge above Douma, Batroun District, North Governorate, Lebanon, at about 1,450 metres. Douma itself sits at 1,070 metres, 88 km from Beirut, 30 km from Byblos and 45 km from Tripoli. Directions are on the contact page.