A hike through a forest to a mountaintop view, but the view wasn't the bit that felt best.

Four hours with Dan, up a mountain neither of us had climbed and back down again.

There was no map involved, no phone, and no app. What we had was a trail somebody had cut, kept open by animals and people through regular use, with the occasional dab of paint on a tree to tell you that you were still on it.

What was interesting was how quickly I overlooked the people who made it possible.

I'd already decided what this hike was before we began. Two men, a mountain, no device, finding our own way up. That's the version I would give somebody in a pub, and it is not quite the full truth.

Someone cut that trail. Someone walks it often enough to keep it open. Somebody I will never meet has been out with a tin of paint, marking trees at roughly the interval a person needs in order to stay not lost. None of that is mine, and all of it was free; I used every bit of it without noticing it was there.

The only part that was genuinely ours was the stretch we went off route. Lost, with a requirement to turn back, retrace our steps and rejoin the trail. Probably fifteen minutes, and it was the most interesting part of the morning. It asked something of us.

Suddenly there was no trail, no marks on trees, no sign of anybody having been there before. We were still in a relatively safe place, but suddenly there was something to work out. That was a sense of exploration beyond the one that comes from climbing a large hill.