There are two kinds of bridge in this gorge, and the difference between them is the whole visit. The first was cut by water. Onbashi is a limestone arch ninety metres long, nineteen wide and forty high, left standing when the river dissolved everything around it, and it is registered as a national natural monument. From the second car park a level path reaches it in about twenty-five minutes.

The others were built by people, and there are three of them, all painted red. They cross Shinryuko, the reservoir at the southern end — Shinryu Bridge, Sakura Bridge, and one called Momiji Bridge, which is to say the bridge named after autumn leaves. In the last days of October the name stops being decorative. A circuit of the lake takes about fifty minutes on foot, and a sightseeing boat runs the same water from below.

Taishakukyo is a karst gorge, eighteen kilometres from end to end, cut into a limestone plateau in the north-east of Hiroshima. The upper section holds caves and a rock gate; the lower holds the lake. They are twenty minutes apart by car, or two and a half hours on foot along the nature trail, which tells you something about the shape of the place.

Peak colour runs from late October into the first days of November. You can cross the bridges or pass beneath them. Which one you do depends on which end of the gorge you started from, and that is worth deciding before you set out.