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One of the flower-bedecked chalets at Clambin (Walk 97)

Chalets and haybarns close ranks alongside narrow cobbled alleyways, seemingly unaltered in appearance for hundreds of years. At their windows boxes of geraniums and petunias add welcome colour, while small square vegetable plots are kept trim with chard and lettuce growing in neat rows. The aroma of cut grass and cow dung hangs over many of the villages, and it’s not unusual to see women tackling everyday chores dressed in traditional costumes of long black skirts, white blouses and black bodices embroidered with red and white threads, and with red scarves loosely tied. Some of the older folk wear traditional bonnets too – not for show, not for the benefit of tourists or for Sunday mass, but because it is simply their way.

Mostly, of course, tourism has had a major impact on village life and on the mountain scene, especially where downhill skiing dominates the locality’s income. Above Zermatt and Saas Fee, for example, cableways whisk visitors to remote summits or viewpoints where restaurants and gift shops stand on rocks that once were known only to climbers and Alpine choughs. Engineers have even tunnelled into the mountains to create underground railways – remarkable feats of engineering, no doubt, but unwarranted acts of vandalism on a fragile mountain environment.