A journey on foot through space and time

The bald king Mweelrea, or Muilrea, according to one's culture, hunches up against the sun these mornings, keeping us in shadow until well after the school bus has fled northwards. With any frosty clarity the summit is, indeed, a bald dome, but just as often it wears a wig of mist, curling down perpetually to evaporate in warmer air. And on soft days, the cliffs above the bog are, inevitably, shrouded and sulking under a thick cap of cloud.

Living with Connacht's highest mountain means I can pick my day to climb it - which allows, of course, an infinite procrastination. The growing traffic to the top of young, light-footed parties from the adventure centre on the far side could even discourage me from struggling up there again.

Meanwhile, I have been revisiting the mountain vicariously with two of its more graphic diarists. Claude Wall, a founder member of the Irish Mountaineering Club, charged up Mweelrea in 1932; Mike Harding, a seasoned hillwalker and travel writer, made it in 1995.

Both, as it happened, climbed the peak on a day of thick, clinging mist, when the maze of spurs and cliffs in the Mweelrea massif can make it as confusing and dangerous a place as a mountain twice its height. As Harding observes, "There was nothing but nothing all around me and some of that nothing had big holes in it" - a scenario scarcely relieved by an assault from a screeching raven.

Neither he nor Wall seems to have regretted the experience, however, a resilience common to most of the authors collected by Michael Fewer for his anthology, A Walk In Ireland. They span a couple of centuries, from Samuel Johnson, who fell in the Liffey and was rescued by a cow, to Paul Theroux and Colm T≤ib∅n, both roaming abroad in the North.

Fewer has written many good books about walking in Ireland but is, professionally, an architect. By coincidence, the author of the season's second new walking book is Sean Rothery, the architectural historian, whose secret passion for adventure is revealed in A Long Walk South.

Even from the first page it is engaging enough, the diary of a walk of 2,300 kilometres, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. But the personal context that emerges so modestly eventually has the reader hobbling along beside the author, urging him on to the last step of the way.

As he sets out, in May, across the dykes and polders of Holland, we learn of his compulsory retirement at 65 and his feeling of insult at a "retirement course" organised by his institution when a doctor - "an overweight 40-something" - admonished his audience, senior citizens overnight, to take long walks - at least two or three miles.

Rothery resolved to go on a real journey, not quite a Patrick Leigh Fermor walk to Constantinople, but something nearly comparable and dramatic: a long journey on foot through space and time. As he proceeds, with The Forsyte Saga weighing down his rucksack and trainers on his feet, we learn something of his youthful enterprises, including cycling from Dieppe to Rome and back in the ruins of post-war Europe.

There is brief reference to a climbing accident in 1967, but not until page 212 does he spring the details of the appalling episode above Zermatt when "a great black mass of rock came thundering down on me". It smashed his leg and he spent three years with crutches and a caliper, knowing his future as a serious alpinist was at an end. But when a consultant told him he would never walk again without a built-up shoe and a stick, "I said to myself, sod you, I'll prove you wrong".

This, then, was the 66-year-old with a dicky knee who set out in 1994 on a four-month trek from the cold North Sea to Nice. He was walking the GR 5, the long-distance trail pioneered by the French and extended northwards, through Luxembourg and Belgium, to the coast of Holland. Through suburbs full of guard dogs, in forests and on mountain passes, it is waymarked by red-and-white strips of paint on walls, trees or boulders: the need to find the route and stay on it becomes a daily obsession.

The first few weeks, with too much concrete, too many blisters, too few decent B&Bs, don't sound a lot of fun. Then, slowly, come healing beech woods and wild strawberries, until, among the larks and alpine flowers on the crest of the Vosges, "I felt as fit as I was 30 years before". Rothery's narrative is unaffected, and concerned as much with the minutiae of meals and lodgings as with any Hazlitt-style exaltations.

He is no Theroux, Raban or Bryson, which makes him all the more real in his haste to get out of towns and tourist traps and back to the high horizons of Savoie. It is here, walking long days in hot sun and sleeping badly among the snorers in crowded alpine huts, that he asks why he is doing this to himself.

It is also where, after 2000 kilometres of pounding, his left ankle begins to swell. He has 11 days of hard walking to go, up and down the steep, sawtoothed ridges of the Alpes Maritimes. Dipping his foot in icy streams seems to dull the pain and reduce the swelling, but depression creeps into despair. He buys a stick, for balance in loose scree, and struggles on into September, escorted over the last high passes by migrating yellow butterflies and violent thunderstorms. It is, he allows, some sort of metaphor for trying to discover his lost youth.

Of course he gets there - how could he not? So it looks as if I'll have to plod up Mweelrea at least one more time.

A Walk In Ireland is published by Atrium, £12.99 (€16.50) A Long Walk South is published by Collins Press, £13.99 (€17.78)