Kakum Canopy Walkway is a chain of seven rope bridges strung between living hardwoods forty metres above the rainforest of Kakum national park, in the Central Region of Ghana an hour from Cape Coast, tied to the trees and never nailed, built in 1995 so that the forest would be worth more standing than cut, and it is the most visited attraction in the country, crossed one plank wide over the canopy. The park is 375 square kilometres of the rainforest that once covered southern Ghana, protected in 1992 when the timber companies were moving in, and the walkway was the argument for keeping it, drawing 2,000 visitors in its first year and hundreds of thousands since; a forest ecologist and surveyors assessed each of the seven anchor trees for strength and health before a rope went round it, and the viewing decks between the spans wrap around living emergent trees, held by rope and cable that never break the bark, so the whole structure hangs from the forest itself. The spans sway underfoot with the treetops at eye level and the floor lost below, 350 metres in all, and from the steep forest path that climbs to them through the understory the bridges are almost invisible until the light catches the netting.
The forest holds elephants, bongo and monkeys, but the elephants are not seen from the walkway, since they make themselves known at the park's edge instead, raiding the cocoa, cassava and maize of the surrounding villages; what is seen is the canopy, hornbills and the birds of the treetops, and from April to June the peak of the park's 600 species of butterfly, drifting past the ropes at canopy level and gathering in damp patches along the trails. The walkway is crossed in the morning before the coach parties, and a night walk with a ranger shows the forest floor by torch. The Cape Coast castle of the slave trade is an hour away and done in the same day. Kakum is a forest that a walkway saved, and the bridges hang from what they protect.