High on the hill was a lonely goatherd

Back from a delightful holiday in Austria, involving wine, food, the magnificent art and dubious translations* of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the company of the splendid azdak, who bore up nobly under questioning as to when we could next expect her to produce some Wimseyfic. The main event involved a three day point-to-point walk, with luggage transported separately, round the Ötscher, which is a mountain in Lower Austria that as far as I can make out from the guidebooks no-one in the English-speaking world has heard of. I certainly hadn’t. I was happy to be educated, for the walk around, and also over the top, is delightful, involving some impressive canyons, a lot of trees, and (optional) a very big ridge that was brilliant, notwithstanding that in going down rather than up it we technically did it in the wrong direction.

( Cut for pictures )