The weather was pleasant and warm but breezy and midge-free, so we chose a suitable day and headed north. My goal was to get to one of the ridge lines of Quinag, which I had originally intended to visit before I changed my mind and hiked Canisp in summer 2024. The view from that peak had encouraged me to return: the triple-peaks of Quinag are clearly visible from the summit and stand pleasantly isolated from the surrounding landscape.

We parked in the reasonably-sized car park beside the main A894 road. Looking across towards our goal for the day was a little daunting at first, although less so than from the road approach along the shoreline of Loch Assynt, as the road climbs steeply from Skiag Bridge to take some of the elevation off the challenge. However, I had studied the topographical maps and knew what to expect. It was certainly no stroll in the park, but the comparatively gentle approach to the base of the mountain gave us a good warm-up. I was happy to see the well-defined path this time around, as I found the path-less hike to Canisp more challenging thanks to being unguided that time by anything more than a dotted line on a map.

A golden plover seemed to accompany us at a distance for part of the walk in, tweeting pleasantly as we approached Lochan Bealach Cornaidh at the foot of Spiedean Còinich (one of the three summits). From there, the path became quickly steeper as we made our way towards the saddle, reminding me a little of the walk up to Leiterenpass in Switzerland. From there, we caught our first views of the west coast and stopped for a break and something to eat, before turning partly back on ourselves to follow a steep, heavily used path uphill.

About two hours after leaving the car, we reached the second saddle between Sàil Ghorm and Sàil Gharb, with a view down to the Kylesku bridge and decided that this was enough ascent for the day. These days, I am more than happy to let a walk take its course and recognise when I have reached my personal goal, even if it is not the actual summit.

We took some photos, sat down for another rest and watched the clouds race across the mountain landscape before making our way slowly back to the car.

Today, though, the temperatures were only in the mid-twenties and there was a pleasantly cool breeze. After putting some effort into training at the gym recently, I wanted to take the opportunity to see how my fitness was coming along.

I considered a few different places, but rather than deliberately choosing a steep and challenging route, I decided to head to the far end of the Lauterbrunnen valley. There are paths leading up from the little village of Stechelberg which you can follow for as far as you feel like. For the exceptionally fit, the routes continue high into the mountains, but there are also a couple of mountain guest houses at more realistic distances.

As I only had the afternoon available, I knew I wasn’t going to contemplate reaching the second or third of them at Tschingelhorn and Obersteinberg. The first, at Trachsellauenen, seemed comfortably within reach. One of the advantages of this route is that there’s no real commitment: you can simply walk until you’ve had enough and then turn around. My walk today covered around 6 kilometres and 330 metres of ascent and descent.

I’d been up to this secluded part of the famous valley a few years ago, although on that occasion I’d decided that I couldn’t be bothered continuing further along the valley. I hadn’t done enough research beforehand to know what lay ahead, so I turned off onto another path that time, and climbed fairly steeply for ten minutes or so to a viewpoint at Schwendi, looking back down the valley, before continuing around to a steep, zig-zagged and uninspiring path through the forest.

I didn’t want to repeat that walk today. The idea was to go somewhere new, enjoy an afternoon outside and take some photographs with my proper camera for the first time in weeks. Getting there involved cautiously making my way by car through Lauterbrunnen itself, which is always something of a nightmare at this time of year. There are so many tourists, and people have a habit of stepping off the pavement to walk around one another even where the road is already very narrow. August — particularly a Saturday afternoon in August — isn’t the ideal time to visit. Still, I was determined to get to a quieter destination, and I know the valley well enough that heading well away from the main tourist attractions, railway stations and cable cars, seemed a fairly safe bet.

Even so, I probably passed a couple of dozen people coming back down the path as I walked up. That was slightly surprising, although not really a problem. Presumably some had stayed overnight at one of the mountain huts, while others had simply started much earlier in the day and were making their way back as I was only just setting off.

The gravelled path itself isn’t too difficult. It climbs more or less continuously, with only three sections steep enough to make you lean properly into the slope, and no stepped sections. I deliberately took my time: I wanted to pay attention to the details of the landscape, rather than simply ploughing onwards. Although a gravelled private road leads less steeply to my goal, I wanted to take the slightly steeper route and see how strong my legs were.

Once you leave the valley floor behind, the mountains begin to crowd around you and feel enormously high. Years of erosion have carved deep channels into the rock, with huge waterfalls pouring down the cliffs in places. Higher still, glaciers cling to some of the upper reaches of the surrounding mountains.

As you gain height, the Breithorn becomes an increasingly dominant feature. It’s already one of the most prominent mountains when you look towards the head of the valley, but further up the path it becomes even more dramatic, particularly where a huge waterfall—the Schmadribachfall—appears directly in front of it.

When I reached the guest house, I found a place beside the river and sat there for a good twenty minutes. The cascades were right beside me and there was a magnificent view towards the great mountains at the very head of the valley. It was wonderfully peaceful. There were probably a dozen people sitting outside on the terrace of the Berghaus, but the noise of the river drowned them out completely and I felt almost as though I had the place to myself.

After a break and something to eat from my rucksack, I started back down. Rather than following the same path all the way to the car, though, I branched off onto a much more secluded path, with the intention of reaching the viewpoint at Schwendi I’d visited a few years earlier but without the thigh-killing path I’d used before.

Although the path is clearly marked on the map and red-white markers confirmed that I was heading in the right direction, it felt surprisingly little used. There were a couple of uncharacteristically rickety gates on the path, and only the faintest of tracks through the grass until I reached the woods. A fairly new bench stood incongruously in the silence as I passed.

Inside the forest, the path rose and fell gently and crossed several little footbridges, which looked as though they’d been made roughly using timber from the surrounding trees. There were small cascades hidden amongst the trees, and having the entire path to myself made the walk particularly peaceful.

One thing I’ve noticed here before is how little wildlife there seems to be in these woods. Between the rushing water and my tinnitus, I probably wouldn’t have heard many birds even if they had been around, but I remember thinking the same thing the last time I walked here. In most woodland I know, there’s almost always the sound of small birds flitting around somewhere out of sight. Here, the forest seems unusually quiet.

I eventually reached the viewpoint, but by then the light had already disappeared from the valley below. Rather than lingering, I turned back and dropped down to the lower path again.

From there, it was another half an hour or so back to the car. I took it fairly slowly as my legs were beginning to tire, but I was pleased with how I felt overall.

The walk came to around six kilometres, with roughly 330 metres of ascent and descent. That might not sound especially dramatic, but for me it was a reassuring sign that my fitness has improved considerably since the beginning of the year.

Cycling to work more often and spending time on the fitness machines at the gym seem to be having exactly the effect I’d hoped for. If I can keep progressing at roughly this pace, I should be in much better shape the next time we head away for a proper hiking trip.

I’d wanted to be more practical and do things without using a computer or a camera for some time. So last year, I decided to pull my finger out and teach myself how to use woodworking tools. I already had all sorts of bits and pieces in the cellar, which had been waiting for me to find the time and inclination to use them. After reorganising my working schedule, I set aside half a day each week, with the intention of dedicating it to woodworking.

As time has passed over the past year, things have inevitably changed, and I haven’t been able to spend as much time learning and practicing as I’d hoped. However, if my abilities were based on the number of YouTube videos I’ve watched, I’d imagine I should be able to make things relatively well by now.

I’m no expert and have only a very small amount of practical experience, but I’m quite pleased with the little bug hotel I made for our balcony, which is shown in the photograph accompanying this blog post. (It’s due a small upgrade with a mesh front, which I am going fit once the mason bee life cycle is done for this year.) I’ve made a few other simple things, such as a modified and reinforced desktop between two IKEA office units in my home office. I also have a little pile of various ideas and test pieces sitting next to the woodpile in the cellar.

I have plenty of wood to be getting on with because a house was rebuilt on our street last year, and the builders had quite a sizeable pile of leftover pine beams. Expecting to have to pay for them, I left a note pinned to the top of the pile with my telephone number. I was amazed—given the fact that we’re in Switzerland—to receive a phone call saying that I could simply take whatever I could use, free of charge.

The thing I’m most looking forward to making is a linen-basket-style unit for my home office. It will be triangular because of the peculiarities of the remaining space in the small room. Hence, a decent amount of measuring and trigonometry, for the first time in many years. There’s a lot more maths involved in woodworking than I anticipated.

As I’m a big fan of buying fancy bits of kit for my hobbies, I have to keep a lid on buying any more tools until I’ve actually made a few pieces. My interest doesn’t lie in small, fiddly projects, but rather in practical solutions to things I need. Since starting this new hobby, I have invested in a drill, a jigsaw, a scroll saw and plenty of smaller bits and pieces. Jo bought me an electric planer and I found a great little precision mitre saw in the local brocante for next to nothing. A project in the office I rent for work saw the purchase of a Dewalt sander a couple of years ago, which Jo used intensively and which probably got the metaphorical ball rolling in my mind. This sander saw some proper use at home last summer, when I finally got around to restoring the tops of our oak dining and coffee tables.

I don’t need any more picture frames, as I think I already have at least a few dozen that I’ve bought from various places at various times, many of which are collecting dust. That being said, I would like to make myself a nice panoramic (3:1) picture frame at some point, which will be custom-measured to align with the maximum size of print and passepartout I can prepare at home. Panoramic imagery is one of my favourite approaches to photography; I’ve been taking panoramic photographs for so many years that I constantly have a regular supply of new images that I will be able to swap in and out whenever I feel like it.

All I have to do now is find the time to get back into the workshop in the cellar of our house. (The landlord used to be a professional woodworker.) Autumn will be full of hiking and photography, but once the weather turns cold and the mountains turn white, I’m sure I’ll be able to devote a few more hours each month to staying indoors on a more regular basis.

For me, it’s all about enjoying the process: producing something with my hands and getting a great deal more pleasure than I probably should from simply cutting a piece of wood at the correct angle and not relying on a computer to do all the work for me.

Anyway, after we had a wonderful break on the Isle of Skye, our next stop was eastern Scotland, where we hadn’t been for quite some time. After a very long drive, we arrived in the rolling farmland of Angus to revisit some old haunts.

The weather was very pleasant, so I managed to photograph some of the scenes that have stuck in my memory ever since I first visited 20 years earlier: hay bales ready to be collected from the fields, the wonderful rattling of the sea as it hits the pebbles on Auchmithie beach, and some new sights, too.

After a couple of days in the very familiar landscape of Angus, we started heading south towards our next extended stay in Cumbria. We decided to stop at the Kelpies, two huge metallic sculptures of horse heads that the artist Andy Scott placed in the landscape near Falkirk in 2014. After wandering around, taking a few nice photos and having lunch at the café, we also decided to visit the Falkirk Wheel, a tremendous example of canal-based engineering that is famous in this part of Scotland.

There were plenty of people there watching the activity, and I set up my camera to capture a rather wobbly time-lapse as a boat entered; the lower lock was then lifted up to the upper canal channel so that the boat could continue its journey.

Visiting this part of the world is always lovely because it holds so many memories going back so many years for both Jo and me. We don’t get the chance to visit as often as we would perhaps like, but we certainly couldn’t complain that we got to see wonderful views and visit a few familiar places this time around.

I chose a beautiful autumn day for a visit last year and took the long way round to reach the parking spot—via Habkern—because the usual road up from Waldegg was closed. That gave me the opportunity to take a few photographs before I had even started walking, capturing some of the beautiful mountain scenery on the lower slopes of the mountain, before dealing with the mercifully-short section of unpaved alpine track which has a nasty habit of reminding me just how low the bottom of my car is.

The walk up from Chüematte to the farm building at Gemmenalp is as relentless as it has always been, even though it’s as mercifully short as the last stage of the drive in. As it’d been quite a while since I had tackled such a steep path, I found myself stopping more often than I had before, but I pressed on with some determination. There was no hurry, though, so I listened to my body and prioritised enjoying the walk rather than maintaining an unnecessary pace.

The final section leading up to the ridgeline below the peak of the Gemmenalphorn and is particularly steep and stepped, so I made sure to take it at a pace that suited my comparatively unpracticed condition. Once I reached the ridge, I decided to continue to the summit, which I had visited several times before; stopping for a short break at the summit marker to enjoy a packed lunch.

After resting for a while, I decided that the ridge walk towards the Niederhorn, including the highest point of the day at Burgfeldstand, should be achievable. I was finding it hard work, but the weather was beautiful, so I continued at my slow pace, stopping from time to time to take photographs. The section of the path right before arriving at Burgfeldstand is particularly dramatic, where the path narrows between high rock walls on one side and long drop-off to the other.

Although this ridgeline is well known for its ibex and chamois, there were no animals in sight for most of the day and hardly another person either, apart from a couple of hikers in a photogenic pose on one of the distant summits. Before leaving the main trail towards the Niederhorn, I stopped on the summit of Burgfeldstand for another rest. On the slopes leading down towards the path that would take me back to the car, I came across a small group of wild chamois grazing right beside the trail, and I and another walker stopped to silently enjoy this rare treat.

By this point, my legs were becoming quite tired, so I was glad of the gradual descent back towards Chüematte. The forest path winds through varied terrain, twisting through pine woods and crossing hillsides covered with bilberry bushes. Even on the return leg, I still needed to draw on the remaining strength in my legs to keep going up and down the twisty route.

It was during this walk that I first began thinking seriously about getting more regular exercise — not just walking in the countryside, but actively improving my overall fitness. I realised that walks like this had become more taxing and challenging than they should be. I don’t want mountain walks to become an exercise in simply struggling from one section to the next. Instead, I want them to be continue to be enjoyable experiences. Although there will always be a physical challenge because of the altitude and terrain, I don’t want my thoughts to be focused primarily on the next steep slope.

After becoming disciplined about taking near-daily walks over the winter and early spring, I recently joined a local gym. The benefits are already becoming noticeable: my legs are getting stronger and my upper-body strength, which contributes to overall fitness, is gradually improving as well. I can already feel the difference when cycling; uphill sections are becoming measurably easier than they were last year.

I am looking forward to seeing what this regular training will achieve on future hiking days. Once the weather cools down a little, I am particularly looking forward to returning to some of the paths and mountain routes that I have avoided for years because of my lack of fitness.

However, some days need to be mundane. The challenges of life—dealing with other people’s problems, with work projects, or even being in a place where there are countless other people all competing to get in your way—provide more than enough stress to be getting on with, thank you very much.

That’s why days like today, when the sky is grey, the music is down-tempo, and the work is repetitive and mentally unchallenging, are important. A couple of people—Dave, specifically, who was in turn inspired by Ann Mary—have written at different lengths about this topic.

I have to remind myself from time to time that I don’t have to turn every minute of every day into an adventure. Sometimes it’s simply nice to sit back, get on with the easy work, and gain a little mental headspace before things become exciting again, as they luckily and inevitably do.

I picture moments from my life. A warm, sunny, salty afternoon on a beach. The swish and perfect, vibrating click of a well-struck golf ball, rushing away to land on a stripe-mown fairway amongst Scots pine trees. A walk through dappled sunshine in woodland and exquisitely-coiffed gardens full of birdsong near a red castle. Sitting on a hillside, watching the bees and insects buzzing around on their never-ending little missions and talking with my love of future plans. Watching her beaming face in the candlelight of an historic chapel. Driving over the crest of a hill on an empty road and the view opening up in front of us, with a bright orange sun being swallowed by a miles-long rain squall in the distance.

Walking along the road on which we lived in summer rain: smelling warm tarmac covered in running water. Accepting that there’s no way I’d stay dry and succumbing to the fact that it doesn’t really matter. Sitting in a living room listening to family, eating biscuits and drinking tea, and watching my parents smiling together. Car snoozes on the way home with orange streetlights flickering on my eyelids.

Sitting on a park bench surrounded by rose bushes and watching a child bounce past on a pogo stick. Standing in front of a city view as dusk arrived and watching all of the myriad streetlights turn on at the same moment. Walking along a winter path and seeing the faintest wisp of snow spiralling upwards for a moment. Walking along the same path in early autumn, hearing children a mile away splashing in the lake and seeing vintners sitting together on a stone wall, sharing a bottle of wine which a whole season’s effort took to make.

This is life. This is what I work for, what I strive for, and the beauty which I see all around me almost every day. I see the world through rose-tinted glass, which obscures the bullshit which tries to obscure the beauty of life. I will not let it, though, because life is short and so, so beautiful so much of the time if you truly pay attention.

Lead video: Comptine d’un autre été, l’après-midi (reimagined) played by Andrea Vanzo.

This afternoon, probably thirty-three (?) years after first hearing the albums, I discover by chance that the “ooh-ing” in the background of their song “What It Is” is only bloody Michael Stipe! He wrote about the re-release of the album on the R.E.M. website back in 2006; the “little remix” he mentions is on Spotify as part of the two-CD set.

Also re-released is the BLUE AEROPLANES lp called SWAGGER, featuring my cello-esque background vocals on the song “what it is”. The band approached me to add a vocal to the song a thousand years ago, and frankly I thought it was a perfect song already and I would only muddy or fuck it up. So I sang a cello part that they had to put in really quietly.

There is a little remix on the 2nd cd in the package where they mixed my vocal up really loud, and you can hear gerards pre-finished lyric; what I consider to be one of their greatest lyrics, and certainly for me, emboldening. I had always wanted to do a dylanesque, or lou reed type vocal on a song [hear it in “end of the world…” or “belong”] but never felt that I could pull it off in an r.e.m. song; having toured with blue aeroplanes through part of May of 1989, I think it gave me the unconscious courage to go for it in what has become one of my favorite r.e.m. songs of all time, “e-bow the letter”. Gerards incanting over stunning guitars, layered like the feelies or john cale and brian ferry, with heavy dollops of neil young; its a great record. Throw it into shuffle, you want to hear one or two songs at a time, not the whole thing [like pj harvey or kristen hersh, or pixies or janes addiction. Or interpol or hidden cameras or antony and the johnsons for that matter]. Awesome, singular, revelatory. Also perfect summer listening.

Michael Stipe in 2006

We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants in order to see more and farther than they do – not, of course, thanks to our own sharp eyesight or size, but because the size of the giants lifts us up.

In my day job at my web agency Say Hello, I do not believe in selling overly complex or inflated technical solutions. Instead, I focus on delivering the simplest professional solution that fulfils the client’s real requirements. This approach ensures budgets are used effectively and are not wasted on unnecessary maintenance costs or complicated systems.

Read more about this on the Say Hello blog.

Lead photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash.

During our time in the Lake District in 2024, I did a lone hike to the top of the fell which I’ve been driving past ever since first visiting the region in the 1990s.

The road itself is appealing because it wiggles through the landscape pleasingly, and it takes a little courage and commitment as a driver to get through the narrow lanes and up and down one of the steepest and hair-raising road sections in England. Even though I’m very familiar with this route, the ever-deepening potholes, occasionally inclement weather and sudden appearances of Herdwick sheep in the middle of the road can provide varying challenges. These were minor inconveniences this time when compared to the experience of driving out on a beautiful, albeit windy, day.

I parked at the top of the Hardknott Pass, where there are a couple of small lay-bys where you can usually leave a car during off-season without blocking passing traffic. Belted Galloway cattle watched me as I wrapped myself in wind- and waterproof gear and began making my way up the slippery path towards the summit of the fell which gives the pass its name.

Despite having visited this area for around 30 years now, I’d never been to the top of this fell or seen the view from its summit. A YouTube video by English photographer Stuart McGlennon had inspired me to go and see the nearby “Eskdale Needle”: a rock stack set in a very photogenic spot, with the mass of Scafell Pike and the surrounding mountains behind it when viewed from this side.

The path was as squelchy and muddy as many Lakeland routes are in autumn and winter, so I was glad to be wearing my sturdy leather hiking boots and slightly thicker hiking socks than usual. As it turned out, it wasn’t the temperature that posed the biggest challenge, but the wind. Walking up the lee of the fell wasn’t too bad, but the higher I climbed, the stronger the wind surged. By the time I reached the summit, I was grateful for my walking pole to steady my steps, and for the fact that the felltop is comparatively flat and therefore safe.

Although I had my tripod with me, the wind was too strong to keep it steady, so I didn’t bother using it. Instead, I chose to handhold my camera and wait for the right moments as the scudding clouds alternately lit and cast the landscape into shade.

After reaching the summit via the path and getting my shots there, I headed away from the path and diagonally across the tufted landscape to find the view I’d come to see. Finding a suitably flat rock on which to sit, I took a range of photographs in the wind and enjoyed my lunch, capturing several images in different lighting conditions to make sure I got just the right shot.

From there, I headed back towards the pass road, but instead of returning directly to the car, I visited a nearby summit called Border End. Thankfully, I found a large rock several feet high with a flat side facing leeward, which sheltered me from the wind and allowed me to hunker down for a while and enjoy a calm, mindful, and deeply relaxing quarter of an hour. I did nothing but look out across the landscape to the Irish Sea and reflect on how lucky I am to keep returning to a region I’ve loved for so many years. Little did I know on one of my first visits, when I slept in the passenger seat of a friend’s parent’s car in the Langdale valley, that this place would speak to me so deeply so many years later.

As I eventually started to walk back to the car, with clouds scudding and the light gradually fading, I was blessed with an extremely fortunate gap in the clouds which briefly illuminated the felltop. I quickly unpacked my camera again and grabbed a photograph of the light in the gathering darkness.

Realising it wouldn’t get any better than that, I returned to the car, shooed away the cattle which had decided to gather around it for some reason, changed back into softer shoes, and headed back to the holiday cottage.

Footnote

Just before I published this post in early 2026, cinematographer Terry Abraham published a short film in which his friend and collaborator David Powell-Thompson walks to the summit and back from lower down the Eskdale valley.

Striking out across the back of the dunes, I was immediately reminded of how difficult it is to walk in trainers on shifting sand. Twenty-five years ago, these dunes were in danger of sliding away altogether; now they have been anchored by grasses and ferns. Spiky memories from childhood are now constrained to the lower slopes of the sandy hillocks bordering the beach — a great shame, but at least one that ensures the dunes will stand the test of winter tides.

As we schlepped up to the top of the highest dune, we came across a bright green moth caterpillar with yellow stripes, desperately making its way from one side of the path to the other. We stopped and watched its efforts for a few minutes and were pleased to see that it made it safely across — a minor marathon for such a small creature.

A little further on, I found the view I had come to photograph: looking down over a tufted hillock of grasses, across the beach with tiny stick-like people making their way back and forth, and across the bay to the distinctive rocky headland I remember so well. Having taken the photograph I wanted to capture, we carried on along the trail, part of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.

Passing through a leafy glade, on the left of which the remains of a ruin still sit, we reached the junction leading up to the cluster of houses and bungalows where I used to stay as a child. The path leads on towards Swanlake Bay, but short, rocky steps lead onto the beach here.

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I remember running all the way up from this beach to a family friend’s house to use the telephone, calling the Coast Guard when an older man slipped on the rocks, banged his head, and knocked himself unconscious. The great excitement of the big yellow helicopter landing on the beach was one of the highlights of my time in Freshwater East — albeit a slightly happier memory for me than for the man concerned. I sometimes wonder what became of him, whether he was okay in the end.

The intervening years have played many tricks on the distances and sizes of places from my youth. The tiny trickle of water running from the coast path down to the beach is smaller than I remember, yet the rocky elevation where my dad used to sit and keep an eye on us as we played in the surf remains unchanged. The next cluster of rocks along the coast, where we were allowed to sit when we were a little older — with more space to spread out and further from the steps down to the beach — is still the same.

I scrambled easily over the red sandstone rocks, finding a vantage point from which to take another photograph towards the headland. It’s strange that I didn’t feel as sad as I had expected. I had worried that being at the beach would make me unhappy, but in the end it was okay. Although I have so many memories here, the fact that Dad and Sarah are no longer with us didn’t weigh too heavily on my mind. Perhaps it was the beauty of the warm day, and the sense that they wouldn’t want me to be unhappy, that allowed me to focus on taking pictures and enjoying an hour or so by the sea.

I no longer have the expertise to judge exactly when the tide is coming in or going out, but it soon became clear that we weren’t going to reach the large cave this time, to which I’ve been returning since I was a kid. As I was photographing a large rock with my camera on its tripod, it became evident that the tide was indeed coming in, not going out. I took my shots and moved around the corner to the large rock pool I remember from my youth — one of the subjects I particularly wanted to photograph on this visit.

I had a quick and amusing chat with a young local family, reminiscing about playing in the giant rock pool in which I played as a child. Their dog entering the water made me joke that perhaps the sea wasn’t warmed by the sun, but by enthusiastic pets splashing around. As it turns out, the family father also remembers the days when the small cabins and the ugly houses down at Trewent Point were rental properties; now they are all privately owned holiday homes.

Having taken the photographs I’d hoped for, we walked back along the beach for twenty minutes or so, barefoot with our trousers rolled up. Jo searched for stones and found a couple of Pembrokeshire rocks with small holes in them. I took a few snaps of the water lapping over my feet and recorded a couple of short video sequences with sound, so I can replay them when I’m back home in the mountains.

After walking the full length of the beach — remembering how we used to call the Trewent end “the shitty end” because of an increased amount of litter nearer the beach cafe— I stood in the water for a few minutes, not caring about the base of my trousers, taking it all in. Looking up along the beach to the headland, across to Trewent Point, east along the coastline. I paused for breath before turning my back on the sea and walking back to the car.

After a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing while trying to decide what I wanted to do on my birthday back in January, I finally hit on the idea of going up to the Eigergletscher mountain station, high above Grindelwald and below the peaks of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau. Although there are plenty of summits to visit in this region, Eigergletscher is particularly special for historic reasons. It’s the point at which a tunnel begins, driving its way through the sheer rock of the cliffs above and ending up at the Jungfraujoch.

There have been buildings on this spot for more than a century—visiting the old train station building here was one of my first experiences of being completely alone in the Alps in temperatures below −20 °C, when I was there to photograph the winter landscape at sunset. Jo and I also visited several times over the years, including a visit to the old husky station in 2009. (The dogs are sadly long since gone.)

In 2020, a massive concrete complex of cable-car and more modern and capable train station, part of the project connecting Grindelwald directly with Männlichen and Eigergletscher with large and fast cable-cars, was completed and opened to the public. The construction has taken away some of the historic Alpine feeling, but it’s definitely a much better experience to be able to choose the Eiger Express over the train and get to the high mountain stations in 15 minutes from the valley. However, the original mountain restaurant—a small space in one of the old buildings—remains largely traditional, with a wood-panel interior and a wonderful smell of cooking cheese.

That’s just as it should be for me in the Alps, although I appreciate the fact that a terminus like this, which sees many thousands of people every year heading up and down the mountain, must be modern and able to accommodate so many visitors. It’s still incredibly sad when practicalities outweigh the traditional experience of being in a space that reflects the history of Alpine exploration.

This is a very long way of saying that I chose, for my birthday, to take the cable car up to the Eigergletscher restaurant to have a very fine cordon bleu followed with an Eigerspitzli (small chocolate mountain confection, filled with praline), while Jo enjoyed a Graubünden speciality: capuns. After enjoying both our lunch and the experience of being there, we put on our spikes and walked down the sledge track to Kleine Scheidegg.

For some reason there were very few people on the mountain that mid-afternoon, which made the experience even nicer for me. As we reached Kleine Scheidegg to catch the train back down to the valley, we arrived with the last of the sun, and Jo slid down the final section of path using the slipperiness of her winter hiking trousers instead of a sledge. I managed to fly the drone while we were on the mountain to capture some photographs and a short film sequence of both mountain stations.

This was a perfect day out for me: exercise, a little bit of Swiss Alpine history, wonderful company, and some photography to look at on grey days when I’m stuck in the office.

If you visit in September, as we did this time, many of the trees in this valley will be turning to autumn colour and you may well hear the red deer calling on the upper slopes of the surrounding mountains. We didn’t see any sign of them, but an occasional bellow echoing distantly amongst the high cliffs confirmed that they are up there, somewhere. We crossed paths with a woman carrying binoculars who had seen some animals near the tree line on the western side of the valley, but we, with our inferior non-amplified eyesight, weren’t so lucky.

After turning left and then immediately right when reaching the road and bridge at Broch, we took a short sandwich break to enjoy the views, before continuing along the river to Schwarzwaldalp. From here, which is the end of the public road and where there is a picturesque little hotel, restaurant and historic sawmill, we kept to the tree line and headed along the walking path through the woods. The path here quickly begins to gain altitude and there are some steeper sections, but we took our time and enjoyed the peace and quiet, stopping here and there for photos and to catch our breath.

The top end of the walk, near Schwandboden and Alpiglen, is pretty spectacular because it’s the northern run-off valley of the Wetterhorn; if you have a bit more energy than we did this time, you could push on to the saddle at Grosse Scheidegg and enjoy the panoramic views. Instead of getting the bus back down the valley, we chose to continue enjoying our walk and headed back down the path which criss-crosses the road a couple of times. We rejoined the tarmac for a while because of tired legs and a more easy-going return to Schwarzwaldalp. From there, we returned the way we’d come, along the forest track, and enjoyed the views across to the cliffs above the Rosenlaui gorge once more.