Mark Seymour - Tour Guide, na, Bath (2026)

20/05/2026

In the year of Our Lord 1286, when the winds of the North Sea still behaved themselves with a certain grudging politeness and the town of Dunwich stood proud upon its precarious edge of sand and shingle, there lived within the friary walls a man of modest ambition, considerable appetite, and an unfortunate tendency toward damp feet. He was known as Brother Anselm, though among the brethren…. who were not above small indulgences of wit…. he was privately regarded as the Order’s most enthusiastic observer of kitchens and least energetic observer of silence.

The friary itself lay slightly inland, though in Dunwich such a description required generous interpretation, for the sea had already begun its slow, patient gnawing at the town’s edges long before Anselm ever learned to tie the rope belt about his habit. The place had once been among the most prosperous ports in England, its churches numerous, its markets lively, its streets echoing with the calls of merchants who dealt in wool, fish, and the occasional questionable relic. By Anselm’s time, there remained grandeur enough to impress a visiting cleric, but there were also quiet absences—empty plots where houses had stood, and stories told in low tones of land that had slipped into the sea as if called away by some unseen summons.
Brother Anselm, however, concerned himself less with the theological implications of erosion and more with the practical matter of how to keep his sandals dry on the walk between the refectory and the chapel. He had been assigned the humble duties of tending the garden, assisting in the kitchen, and, on particularly unfortunate days, copying manuscripts in a hand that suggested either deep contemplation or a mild but persistent drowsiness. His days passed in a gentle rhythm of prayer, labour, and strategic positioning near the ovens when fresh bread emerged, steaming and fragrant, from their brick confines.

The friary garden, which Anselm tended with a mixture of devotion and absent-minded wandering, produced cabbages of a stoic disposition, onions that brought tears to even the most hardened brothers, and a small patch of herbs that he insisted improved every dish, though not always to the agreement of those who ate them. He had a particular fondness for fennel, which he cultivated with such enthusiasm that one might have mistaken him for a man preparing to feed an army rather than a modest religious house. It was in this garden that he first noticed the subtle unease that crept into the air in the days before the great storm.
At first, it was merely the birds. The gulls, who ordinarily conducted themselves with all the decorum of a rowdy market crowd, grew strangely subdued, their cries fewer and more uncertain, as though they had misplaced their usual confidence. The smaller birds vanished altogether, abandoning the hedgerows and orchard trees with a suddenness that Anselm found unsettling, though he struggled to articulate precisely why. He mentioned it once, in passing, to Brother Matthew, who nodded gravely before returning his attention to a pie of such complexity that it appeared to contain both theological symbolism and at least three different meats.

The sea, too, took on a peculiar character. It lay outwardly calm on certain mornings, its surface smooth as polished pewter, but there was a tension beneath that calm, a sense of restrained force that made even Anselm, who rarely troubled himself with maritime concerns, pause and stare a little longer than usual. Fishermen returned early, their nets lighter than expected, their expressions less inclined to jovial complaint and more to quiet contemplation. The town itself carried on, of course, for commerce and routine are stubborn companions, but there was an undercurrent of apprehension that threaded its way through the market stalls and along the narrow lanes.
Anselm observed all this with a growing unease that he attempted to counter with increased attention to his duties, though this resulted chiefly in overwatering the cabbages and seasoning the broth with a degree of enthusiasm that bordered on reckless. He found himself lingering at the edge of the garden, looking eastward where the horizon met the sea, as if expecting some visible sign of what he felt pressing invisibly upon the world.

The day the storm began did not announce itself with immediate fury. It crept in with a wind that was at first merely insistent, tugging at cloaks and rattling shutters with a persistence that suggested it had no intention of departing. The sky took on a colour that defied easy description, a kind of bruised grey that deepened as the hours passed, and the air grew heavy with moisture that clung to the skin and seeped into the very stones of the friary.
Anselm, tasked that morning with assisting in the kitchen, found his attention repeatedly drawn to the narrow window that looked out toward the town. Through it he could see figures moving with increasing haste, cloaks pulled tight, carts hurried along with more urgency than usual. The wind strengthened, its voice rising from a low murmur to a sustained howl that threaded its way through every crack and crevice, turning the friary into a reluctant instrument in a growing symphony of unease.
By midday, the rain had begun in earnest. It fell not in gentle drops but in sheets, driven almost horizontally by the force of the wind, striking walls and roofs with a ferocity that made even the most seasoned brothers glance upward with concern. The gutters overflowed, pathways became streams, and the garden that Anselm had tended with such care transformed into a sodden expanse in which cabbages bobbed with a disconcerting lack of dignity.

It was in the midst of this watery upheaval that Anselm experienced a moment of profound and entirely impractical resolve. Convinced that his fennel patch required immediate attention lest it succumb to the deluge, he ventured out into the storm with a determination that would have been admirable had it not been so entirely misplaced. The wind seized his habit with enthusiasm, plastering it against him in a manner that left little to the imagination and considerably less to comfort, while the rain found every possible avenue by which to infiltrate his garments.

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The garden greeted him with a spectacle of chaos. The neat rows he had so carefully maintained were now indistinct, their boundaries blurred by water that pooled and flowed with equal enthusiasm. The fennel, that proud emblem of his horticultural ambitions, lay flattened and bedraggled, its feathery fronds clinging to the earth as though seeking refuge from the assault above. Anselm stood for a moment, rain streaming down his face, and contemplated the futility of his mission with a clarity that might have been considered spiritual had it not been accompanied by the sensation of cold water trickling steadily into his sandals.
Meanwhile, beyond the friary walls, the true scale of the storm’s intent began to reveal itself. The sea, no longer content with its usual boundaries, surged forward with a force that defied both expectation and experience. Waves crashed against the shore with a violence that sent spray high into the air, and the already fragile coastline began to yield under the relentless assault. Houses nearest the edge shuddered and shifted, their foundations undermined by water that clawed at the very ground upon which they stood.

News reached the friary in fragments, carried by those who sought shelter within its walls. There were tales of streets flooded, of boats torn from their moorings and driven inland, of walls collapsing and earth slipping away into the churning sea. The town of Dunwich, already diminished by years of encroaching tides, now faced a force that seemed determined to hasten its decline with brutal efficiency.
Anselm, having abandoned his rescue of the fennel in favour of preserving his own footing, found himself assisting in the reception of those who arrived at the friary drenched, exhausted, and wide-eyed with a mixture of fear and disbelief. He carried blankets, fetched water, and attempted to offer comfort in a manner that was earnest if not entirely effective, his own appearance… soaked to the bone and liberally adorned with garden debris… lending an unintended note of absurdity to his efforts.

As the storm raged on into the night, the friary became a place of uneasy refuge. The brothers gathered in prayer, their voices rising above the howl of the wind, while outside the world seemed to unravel under the combined assault of water and air. Anselm knelt among them, his thoughts drifting between the solemnity of the moment and the persistent awareness that his sandals had reached a state of saturation that could only be described as theological in its depth.
By morning, the storm had begun to abate, though the wind still carried a lingering edge and the rain fell in a steadier, less furious rhythm. When at last it was deemed safe to venture beyond the friary walls, Anselm joined the others in stepping out into a landscape that bore the unmistakable marks of transformation.
The town of Dunwich had changed. Where there had been streets, there were now channels of water; where there had been buildings, there were gaps that spoke of sudden absence. The coastline itself had shifted, portions of land simply gone, claimed by the sea with a finality that left little room for hope of recovery. It was as though the storm had taken a great bite from the edge of the world and departed, leaving behind a silence that felt both heavy and incomplete.
Anselm stood at the edge of what had once been familiar ground and looked out over the altered horizon. He felt, in that moment, a curious mixture of sorrow and wonder, an awareness of the fragility of all that seemed solid and the enduring persistence of life even in the face of such loss. Then, with a practicality that had served him well in less dramatic circumstances, he glanced down at his feet and considered the long, damp walk back to the friary.

In the days that followed, the work of recovery began, slow and uncertain, shaped by the reality that some losses could not be undone. Dunwich would continue, though diminished, its story altered by the storm that had reshaped its very foundations. Brother Anselm returned to his duties with a renewed appreciation for dry ground, though his enthusiasm for fennel remained undiminished, despite the evidence that even the most carefully tended garden might one day find itself at the mercy of forces far beyond its control.
Anselm….well….he carried on, a small figure in a world of shifting sands and restless seas, his life a blend of devotion, dampness, and a quietly persistent humour that endured, much like the town itself, against the odds.

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( I write these stories to encourage curiosity and travel. This story is based on one of our recent tours. If you’ve enjoyed it, please ‘like and share’. Thank you. I will be leading my own small group tours of East Anglia again in 2027. Join me by following the link above. )

18/05/2026

The first man to excavate what the world would eventually call Seahenge did not set out that morning intending to become famous. He set out, as he had on countless other mornings, with a flask of tea, a bacon sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper, a notebook already stained with peat and rain, and the sort of determined expression generally seen on men who spend their lives kneeling in mud while explaining to passers-by that no, they are not looking for treasure, and yes, they do know what they are doing. His name was Dr Bryn Coleshill, an archaeologist of some reputation and considerable eccentricity, and when he first saw the circle of ancient oak emerging from the shifting sands of the North Norfolk coast in the late summer of 1998, he immediately removed his spectacles, polished them on the tail of his shirt, put them back on, and announced to no one in particular that the Bronze Age had apparently decided to play one final practical joke on modern scholarship.
The Norfolk coast is a place that does not reveal its secrets willingly. It is a long, flat meeting place between land and sea, where the wind blows with the confidence of a tax collector and the mud can consume a boot with the enthusiasm of a starving pig. At low tide, the sands around Holme-next-the-Sea stretch away in broad, glistening bands, their surfaces rippled like old corduroy trousers. The salt marshes beyond are filled with samphire, seabirds, and a smell that can only be described as “historic”. It is a smell compounded of brine, decaying vegetation, wet wood, and the faint but undeniable aroma of old fish. To Bryn, however, it was sweeter than any perfume. The scent of waterlogged timber was to him what roses were to poets and pipe to***co to retired admirals.

The story began when two local men, John Lorimer and John Hodgkinson, noticed an unusual arrangement of ancient oak posts protruding from the sand. Norfolk is not short of men named John, nor of men who keep their eyes open while walking the shore, and these two had the good sense to realise that a ring of old timber with an upturned oak stump at its centre was unlikely to be the remains of a Victorian bathing machine. They contacted archaeologists, and word eventually reached Bryn, who was then working with the Norfolk Archaeological Unit.
Bryn was an excellent archaeologist because he combined a scholar’s patience with a farm labourer’s stubbornness. He was broad-shouldered, mud-spattered, and permanently sunburned on one side of his face due to decades spent peering into trenches from the same angle. His beard had once been auburn but had long since surrendered to grey, and his pockets were filled with mysterious objects: bits of antler, measuring tapes, pencils chewed to stubs, and occasional crumbs of Kendal mint cake. He spoke in a soft Welsh accent that made every observation sound faintly biblical. “This timber,” he might say, crouched in ankle-deep sludge, “is older than Caesar and considerably better behaved.”
The first visit to the site was not especially dramatic. There were no fanfares, no shafts of heavenly light, and no orchestral swell. There was, instead, a cold drizzle and a tide schedule that was as unforgiving as a Victorian headmaster. The exposed circle stood in the intertidal zone, visible only briefly before the North Sea rolled back over it with the deliberate smugness of a cat sitting on a jigsaw puzzle. Bryn, accompanied by a small team carrying surveying equipment, cameras, and expressions of cautious excitement, sloshed across the sand and stood in silence before the structure.

Thirty-five split oak posts formed a rough circle around a central oak stump set upside down, roots reaching toward the sky like the fingers of a drowned giant. Even to an archaeologist, who makes a profession of staying calm in the face of extraordinary discoveries, the sight was deeply unsettling. It seemed both natural and profoundly unnatural. The timbers were dark and slick with seawater, their surfaces preserved by centuries of burial in anaerobic peat. They looked as if they had been erected last week by some very enthusiastic and unusually talented beavers.
Bryn circled the monument slowly. He measured, sketched, photographed, and muttered. This muttering was an essential part of his professional method. To the untrained ear it sounded like complaints about the weather and his knees. To colleagues, it was the audible form of analytical thought. “Interesting tool marks… very interesting indeed… definitely prehistoric… unless the Druids had chainsaws.”
The circle was approximately 6.6 metres in diameter. The posts had been split from mature oak trunks using bronze axes and wooden wedges. The central stump had been carefully placed upside down. Everything about the arrangement suggested intention, effort, and symbolic meaning. This was no casual construction. Bronze Age people had expended enormous labour to create something that was meant to be seen, used, and perhaps feared.
Bryn’s delight was matched only by his anxiety. Coastal archaeology is a race against time, and the North Sea is a ruthless competitor. The timbers, once exposed, began to deteriorate rapidly. Cracks appeared. Marine organisms moved in. Each tide was both revelation and destruction. If the site were not carefully recorded and eventually excavated, centuries of preservation would be undone in a matter of seasons.

The media, naturally, arrived before the second proper cup of tea. Reporters emerged from vans like inquisitive gulls, asking whether this was a temple, a cemetery, a calendar, or evidence of aliens. Bryn, who had little patience for extraterrestrial explanations or any ‘ceremonial and ritual’ nonsense, replied that if Bronze Age Norfolk had hosted visitors from another planet, they had shown a remarkably consistent preference for oak joinery and ritual symbolism.
The press quickly christened the site “Seahenge”, a name that made Bryn sigh so deeply that nearby marsh birds took flight. The comparison to Stonehenge was irresistible but misleading. Seahenge was a timber monument dating to approximately 2049 BCE, more than four thousand years old and belonging to a rich tradition of wooden ritual structures across prehistoric Europe. It was smaller, stranger, and in some ways more intimate than its stone cousin.
The dating came through dendrochronology, the science of tree-ring analysis. Samples from the oak timbers were compared with established chronologies, allowing specialists to determine not merely the century but the very year in which the trees were felled. For Bryn, this was one of archaeology’s greatest pleasures: the sudden collapse of vast time into a precise human moment. Somewhere around the spring of 2049 BCE, men and women in Bronze Age Norfolk had selected these trees, cut them down, split them, dragged them into place, and raised this enigmatic circle on the edge of a tidal landscape.
He often imagined them. Broad-shouldered farmers with wooden sledges, oxen straining in harness, children carrying wedges, elders directing the placement of the central stump. There would have been shouting, laughter, blistered hands, and arguments over whether the stump was definitely upside down or only mostly upside down. Human nature, Bryn believed, had changed less than people liked to think.

The excavation itself became a logistical drama. The site lay in an exposed coastal environment with limited working windows. Teams had to coordinate with tides, weather, conservation requirements, and public interest. Temporary walkways were installed. Every timber was meticulously recorded using photographs, drawings, and three-dimensional survey methods. Conservation specialists stood ready like anxious physicians waiting to transfer a delicate patient to intensive care.
Bryn relished the fieldwork. He wore chest waders, a woollen jumper, and a hat that looked as though it had served in several minor wars. When kneeling beside a timber, he displayed a tenderness usually associated with restoring Renaissance paintings. He brushed away sand with the care of a man uncovering a sleeping infant. He addressed the timbers as though they were elderly relatives with hearing difficulties. “There you are,” he would murmur. “You’ve waited four millennia. We shan’t rush you now.”
Not everyone was pleased by the excavation. Some modern pagans and environmental activists argued that the monument should be left in situ and treated as a sacred site. Protests were organised. Demonstrators gathered on the beach in robes and waterproof jackets, an attire combination unique to the British Isles. They drummed, chanted, and accused archaeologists of disturbing ancestral spirits. Bryn, who respected sincere belief, also knew that the sea was already destroying the timbers. “If the ancestors wished it preserved,” he remarked privately, “they have chosen a singularly damp location.”
The debates were intense and sometimes emotional, but the excavation proceeded under careful planning. The timbers were lifted one by one, wrapped, and transported for conservation at Flag Fen Archaeology Park, where they underwent years of treatment to stabilise the waterlogged wood. This process was painstaking and expensive. Archaeology, Bryn liked to say, was the only profession in which one spent decades studying ancient people and then most of one’s budget on giant tanks of polyethylene glycol.

As each timber was removed, new details emerged. Tool marks testified to skilled craftsmanship. The posts were arranged with bark-side orientation and subtle shaping. The central stump’s inversion suggested cosmological symbolism: roots in the sky, trunk in the earth, a deliberate reversal of the natural order. Many scholars proposed that the monument related to death, transformation, or journeys between worlds. The nearby marshes, where land and sea met, would have been liminal places charged with meaning.
Bryn found the setting particularly compelling. At dawn, with mist drifting over the flats and curlews calling from the marsh, the monument seemed suspended between elements. Bronze Age communities were deeply connected to cycles of season, tide, and perhaps even fertility. A timber circle enclosing an inverted tree may have represented a place where the dead were exposed, where souls were guided, or where communities confronted the mysteries of life and decay.
He explained these possibilities to visitors with contagious enthusiasm and equal doses of scepticism…..he was a pragmatic man. Schoolchildren adored him. He could describe dendrochronology using biscuits, compare stratigraphy to lasagne, and demonstrate Bronze Age woodworking with a stick and an alarming degree of conviction. Once, while showing a group how oak could be split using wedges, he became so animated that he sat down abruptly in a tidal pool. Without missing a beat, he declared that experimental archaeology had entered its immersion phase.

Despite the humour, the work carried emotional weight. To hold a freshly lifted timber was to touch a surface last handled by people who lived more than four thousand years ago. Bryn often ran his fingers over the axe marks and imagined the rhythm of blows, the smell of sap, and the ambitions of those who created the structure. Archaeology, at its best, dissolved time. One moment you were standing in wet socks on the Norfolk coast; the next, you were shoulder to shoulder with Bronze Age builders.
The public fascination with Seahenge was immense. Newspapers, documentaries, and exhibitions brought the monument to international attention. Its eventual display at Lynn Museum allowed visitors to experience the reconstructed circle and central stump in a controlled environment. Bryn was delighted that people who might never willingly spend six hours in a salt marsh could now encounter this extraordinary monument in comfort, dry footwear, and proximity to a gift shop.
He retained a scholar’s caution regarding interpretation. Archaeologists are professionally suspicious of certainty, particularly when discussing ritual monuments. “When someone says they know exactly what this means,” Bryn would tell audiences, “it is wise to hold onto your wallet.” Yet he also embraced wonder. Seahenge revealed that Bronze Age communities possessed technical skill, symbolic sophistication, and an intimate relationship with their landscape.

The excavation transformed Bryn’s career, though not his habits. He remained happiest in muddy trenches with a tape measure and a thermos. Fame sat on him like an oversized raincoat. He tolerated interviews but preferred conversations with local fishermen, whose understanding of tides he considered superior to most academic models. He continued to wear jumpers with holes in the elbows and maintained that the quality of any archaeological season could be judged by the number of sandwiches consumed before noon.
Years later, standing before the conserved timbers in the museum, he was struck by their dignity. Freed from mud and tide, they retained a sombre presence. The central stump, roots raised like antlers, still suggested a world turned upside down. Visitors fell quiet in its presence. Children stared. Adults leaned in and lowered their voices instinctively, as though entering a chapel.
Bryn liked that. He believed archaeology should provoke humility. Human beings, for all their modern technologies and administrative paperwork, remained participants in an ancient story. Four thousand years ago, people on the Norfolk coast had grappled with death, memory, and the unseen. They worked oak with bronze tools and arranged it into a circle that still compelled attention long after their names were forgotten.

In his retirement, Bryn often returned to Holme-next-the-Sea. He walked the beach with binoculars and a stick, scanning the sands with the practiced eye of a man who knew history was perpetually eroding into view. The coast had changed. Storms shifted channels and exposed new fragments of peat. Seals basked on distant banks like overfed civil servants. The wind still came in from the North Sea with enough force to reorganise one’s eyebrows.
He would pause where Seahenge once stood and picture the monument in its original setting: fresh oak gleaming in the sun, the central stump newly installed, families gathered in solemn purpose. Perhaps there were offerings. Perhaps there were songs. Perhaps there was also one Bronze Age labourer muttering that the whole thing would have been much easier on higher ground.
The humour appealed to Bryn because it humanised the past. Archaeology is not about abstract cultures; it is about real people with sore backs, ambitions, beliefs, and occasionally poor planning. The builders of Seahenge were neither mystical caricatures nor primitive curiosities. They were skilled craftspeople and farmers who created a monument of extraordinary symbolic power.
When asked what he felt on first seeing the timber circle, Bryn usually smiled and considered the question for a moment. Then he would say that archaeology offered very few opportunities to experience genuine astonishment. Most days involved paperwork, weather forecasts, and discussions about storage crates. But sometimes, if one was very lucky, the sea withdrew and revealed a message from another age. And in that moment, standing in the Norfolk mud with tea cooling in his flask and his boots filling steadily with water, he felt the unmistakable thrill of meeting his ancestors on their own terms.

He had gone to the coast expecting another day of measurements and practical decisions. Instead, he encountered one of prehistoric Britain’s most evocative monuments. It was strange, beautiful, and profoundly moving. It also ruined a perfectly good pair of socks.
Bryn considered that an entirely fair exchange.

https://www.seymourtravels.co.uk/norfolk-and-suffolk-east-anglia-2027-1
( I write these stories to encourage curiosity and travel and I’ll be leading a tour to East Anglia and this site next year . This story is based on fact. If you’ve enjoyed it, please ‘like and share’. Thank you. Join me by following the link above. )

15/05/2026

In Mürren, the mountain decided everything.
It decided when you woke, because the sun did not rise politely like it did down in the valleys. It clambered over the jagged spine of the Eiger like a drunken climber, spilling light where it pleased and withholding it where it did not. It decided when you planted, because the frost lingered longer than courtesy allowed. It decided when you prayed, because storms came unannounced and departed without apology. And, most importantly, it decided how good your cheese would be.
Johann Luchsinger knew this better than anyone, mostly because he had once tried to argue with the mountain and lost a cow.
Johann was forty-three years old, broad across the shoulders, narrow of patience, and permanently scented of milk, woodsmoke, and damp wool. His beard was the colour of pale straw and trimmed only when it began to frighten children or snag in the butter churn. He lived in Mürren, a scattering of chalets clinging improbably to the cliff like barnacles with balconies, perched high above the Lauterbrunnen Valley where waterfalls fell in silvery ribbons and tourists, though fewer in Johann’s youth, occasionally wandered about with foolish expressions and inappropriate footwear.

In the 1830s, Mürren was not a place one visited lightly. You came because you were born there, married there, inherited land there, or because you had made a series of decisions elsewhere that led inexorably to this point. Johann had been born there, and he intended, God and gravity permitting, to die there too.
He was a cheese farmer, which was not quite the same thing as a farmer who made cheese. Johann’s life was structured around milk in its many moods: frothy and warm at dawn, sour and temperamental by noon, obedient only under firm hands and clean copper vats. His cows, Berta, Klara, Frieda, Ursula, and the ill-tempered Liesl, were Brown Swiss, broad-backed, sure-footed, and wiser than most people Johann knew. He trusted them implicitly, except near cliffs, thunderstorms, or when Liesl had opinions.
Each spring, Johann drove them up to the alpine pastures above Mürren, where the grass grew thick and sweet with wild thyme, gentian, and alpine clover. There, in a small stone hut with a roof weighted by rocks and a door that protested every opening, he made the summer cheese… the hard wheels that would feed families through winter and be traded down-valley for grain, salt, and iron tools…. Cheese, in Mürren, was currency, insurance, and theology all at once.
Johann believed this with an intensity normally reserved for saints.

On the morning this story properly begins, Johann was milking Berta while arguing aloud with God.
“Explain to me,” he said, his forehead pressed briefly against the cow’s flank for balance, “why Liesl produces the most milk when she is in the worst temper.” Berta flicked her tail, which Johann interpreted as agreement.
The alpine hut was alive with sound: milk striking the pail in a steady rhythm, the wind humming through gaps in the stonework, and somewhere outside, the low bell of a cow wandering too close to adventure. Johann finished milking, stood, stretched his back with a sound like timber settling, and carried the warm milk inside.
The cheese room was small but immaculate. Johann was fussy in the way of men whose success depended on bacteria behaving themselves. Copper cauldrons gleamed, shelves were scrubbed, and the air smelled faintly of sour whey and pine resin. He poured the milk, added rennet measured by instinct rather than spoon, and stirred slowly, thoughtfully, as though persuading the milk to become something better than itself.

Cheesemaking was alchemy without the poetry. You watched. You waited. You listened. Johann could tell the curd’s readiness by the way it broke under his finger, clean as a promise. He cut it with a wire harp, stirred again, and began the long, patient work of pressing.
Outside, the mountains watched too. They always did.
Mürren was quiet that summer, but not empty. The 19th century had brought changes creeping uphill like ivy. Roads improved. Railways were discussed in voices both hopeful and horrified. English gentlemen, tall, red-faced, and carrying notebooks, had begun appearing in the valleys, gazing at glaciers as though expecting them to do something interesting. Johann regarded them with suspicion.
On this particular afternoon, as he was turning the cheeses, each wheel heavy enough to make a point about human ambition, he heard unfamiliar voices on the path.
“—surely there must be a better way up—”
“—the guide said this was quite manageable—”
Johann stepped outside and wiped his hands on his apron. Two men and a woman stood awkwardly near the hut, dressed in clothes that had never known a cow. The men wore wool suits far too fine for mountain work, and the woman had a hat decorated with flowers that would not survive a goat’s curiosity.
They smiled with enthusiasm unearned by altitude. “Good afternoon!” said one of the men, in accented German. “We were told there is a cheesemaker here.”
Johann nodded. “There is.”
The woman stepped forward. “We are from Interlaken. We wished to see how Alpine cheese is made. We are… enthusiasts.”
Johann considered this. “Cheese does not care for enthusiasm,” he said. “Only patience.”
The man laughed, assuming a joke. “May we observe?”
Johann shrugged. Curiosity was harmless, mostly. He showed them the hut, the vats, the cheeses stacked like squat golden suns. They asked questions, many questions, and Johann answered with increasing dryness.
“How long must it age?”
“Longer than your boots would last.”
“Is it difficult?”
“Yes.”
“What makes it so special?”
Johann paused. “The grass,” he said finally. “And the waiting.”
The woman tasted a sliver of young cheese and closed her eyes. “Oh. That’s extraordinary.”
Johann nodded. “It will be better in winter. Everything improves with hardship.”
Winter in Mürren was not dramatic in the way visitors imagined. It was quiet, white, and relentless. Snow pressed the world smaller. Paths vanished. Sound was swallowed. The cheese cellar became Johann’s second home, where he turned the wheels weekly, rubbed them with brine, inspected for cracks, and listened for the subtle creaks that meant disaster or success.

He lived alone now. His wife, Anna, had died five winters earlier in childbirth, a daughter who lived only a day. Grief settled into Johann like frost into stone…. invisible from a distance, but splitting everything slowly.
Cheese helped.
Cheese required him to care for something that could not talk back or die suddenly for mysterious reasons. It aged honestly. It rewarded attention.
In February, when the storms howled like offended spirits, Johann would sit in the cellar and speak to the cheeses.
“Patience,” he would tell them. “You are becoming something worthwhile.” It was unclear whether he meant them or himself.
By the 1840s, Johann’s cheese had acquired a reputation. Merchants from the valley sought it out. Inns in Lauterbrunnen paid extra for wheels stamped with his mark, a simple alpine flower carved into wood. There were rumours that his cheese had reached Bern, even Zürich….. This made Johann uncomfortable….. Fame, like weather, brought expectations.

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One autumn, a trader arrived with news. “There is talk,” he said, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of cheese, “of competitions. Agricultural fairs. Cheese judged by men who do not make it.”
Johann snorted. “Then they are unqualified.”
“But prizes,” the trader continued. “Money. Recognition.”
Johann considered his shelves, the careful labour of years. “Cheese should not compete,” he said. “It should be eaten.”
Still, when the invitation came, to send a wheel to an exhibition in Thun, he did not refuse. He selected one carefully, aged perfectly, wrapped it like a child being sent to school, and handed it over with instructions that were ignored immediately.
Months later, word returned…… Second prize !
Johann stared at the messenger. “Second?”
“Yes. Apparently the first was creamier.”
Johann folded his arms. “Then it was younger,” he said. “And will not last the winter.”…… He was not invited again.

In his fifty-second year, Johann slipped on ice while carrying a wheel of cheese and cracked two ribs. The mountain reminded him, gently, that time was passing. He healed slowly. He worked slower. Liesl remained disagreeable.
One spring morning, as he drove the cows uphill again, Johann stopped to catch his breath. Mürren lay behind him, smoke rising, bells ringing, life continuing in its small, stubborn way. The peaks ahead glowed pink with dawn.
Johann smiled. He had made something lasting, in a place that did not promise permanence. His cheese would be eaten, traded, forgotten. But the work, the waiting, the care, was enough. He reached the hut, set down his pack, and began again. The mountain watched.
For once, it seemed satisfied.

https://www.seymourtravels.co.uk/switzerland2027

{ I write these stories to encourage travel. In 2027 we will be running a small group tour in the area. I hope you’ve enjoyed it enough to ‘share and like’. Thank you ! }

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