Don't look down: the 'Saxon Switzerland'

The steps began to obsess me. Our arrival in "Saxon Switzerland" – the region of Germany that lies between Dresden and the Czech border – had coincided with a heatwave. The adventurers who explored and mapped this territory, which is filled with curiously formed cliffs, table-shaped outcrops and solitary pillars, had done so in style, by constructing stone staircases, flights of wooden steps and metal rungs at every juncture. As we sweltered in temperatures of 39C, I counted them as a diversion from the heat.

The architects of the steps were not the first to have appreciated this area. Two artists from Switzerland, Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, journeyed through the Elbe Sandstone Mountains in the 1760s. They were entranced by the pinnacles and peaks jutting out of the Elbe Valley – and the wild romanticism of the woods around them. The story goes that they wrote postcards home saying, "Greetings from Saxon Switzerland" and the name caught on. They brought their pupils here and other artists followed in their wake, including Caspar David Friedrich, whose paintings of the area became famous.

Recently, a 115km footpath called Malerweg (Painters' Way) was opened in homage to these Romantic painters. And I had decided to follow in their tracks.

My fascination with the area started three years ago when revisiting Pirna, a pretty city on the Elbe with a sandstone bridge and medieval Marienkirche, looking much the same as when it was painted by Canaletto. Pirna describes itself as "the gateway to Saxon Switzerland", and in a bookshop there I found a guidebook to walks around the mountains.

In the event, the trip for our party of four was arranged by Augustus Tours, which booked hotels and transported our luggage. We'd made one specification. One of us was "nicht schwindelfrei", the modest German expression for "terrified of heights". We had briefly considered that a walking holiday here was not such a great idea for one thus afflicted, but were reassured when the final itinerary marked alternative routes to the scariest parts.

The itinerary certainly kept us in line. Our first day's walk from Bad Schandau to Rathen was 16km long and took us up 846 steps to the Brand plateau. We kept pace with a walking party from the Bischofswerda (a nearby town) fencing club, one of whom we discovered, when he told us of his time as a POW in Scotland, was 82.

We had requested the second day as a rest day, envisaging a stroll round riverside Rathen, perhaps a matinée of Ein Sommernachtstraum (A Midsummer Night's Dream) in its huge natural amphitheatre amid the rocks. But then an "easy walking" excursion to Lilienstein was suggested. And up Lilienstein, which is 1,360ft high. It took us six hours on the hottest day of the year.

Still, at the top – in a cunning ploy to encourage the faint-hearted – there was a gaststatte, where we could cool down and slake our thirst. This one was erected in 1873. The tourism industry of the late 19th Century was determined that travellers should have their comforts: on the top of almost every table mountain is a rustic hostelry, its supplies regularly winched up the mountain.

By the time we reached Papststein on the fifth day, we had become blasé about restaurants on mountain tops. But the meal there defeated us. This was mountain food at its most literal – the hill of food on each plate would have served two or three people. It also posed a conundrum: if anyone was capable of eating all that food, they would be too fat to walk up the mountain – and certainly too fat to wriggle through the fissures through which some of the routes led. One particularly narrow one on Pfaffenstein, barely allowing passage for one person with a backpack, led to the viewpoint for Barbarine, a 140ft-high pillar, a local landmark.

This area is famous for rock-climbing – sometimes the only people we saw were spreadeagled on a cliff, or lazing at the top before abseiling down. Between 1905 and 1975, Barbarine was the most frequently climbed mountain in the region – until the top was struck by lightning and, apparently, stuck back on again with cement.

Most places are encouragingly accessible. On one summit, a man climbed a ladder carrying a poodle, followed by three women in slip-on shoes. At the other extreme, in Falkenschlucht (Hawk's Gorge) on Gohrisch, someone had chiselled (in 1924, according to the date chipped on the wall) 93 steps out of stone in a cleft which bent sharply under boulders wedged overhead. The route then lead across a ravine with widely spaced struts of wood anchored in its walls.

No wonder one needed to "be aware of freedom from giddiness and to be sure-footed". One descent started off as a pleasant ramble and suddenly turned into something like an assault course, with long ladders and sheer drops.

Usually, however, the steep ascents were more like climbing staircases – fire escapes, perhaps – which seemed incongruous in such once rugged scenery. On our way up one of these from Rathen to Bastei (a 600ft cliff that towers over the Elbe and is spanned by a bridge built for 19th-century tourists), I did a double-take as we passed a metal turnstile in the rocks. It led to Felsenburg Neurathen, an extraordinary medieval settlement perched on pinnacles of rock and connected by bridges.

The nicht schwindelfrei in our party took one look and said he'd sit this one out. It was a city in the sky, with a water cistern, the ruined walls of a room "used for household purposes", a guardhouse and a flight of mossy steps hewn in rock leading to a roofless space where the chapel stood.

Later, we strolled down to the river through shady woods punctuated by giant crags, then chugged along the Elbe, before the final punishing slog up to our hotel close to the Festung Königstein, the largest fortress in Europe and once a castle of the Kings of Bohemia, where there is even a hospital and a cliffside octagonal banqueting house (now licensed for marriages).

Not every day was arduous. We spent a lot of time meandering along gently sloping paths and past meadows and fields. One day we crossed to the Czech side of the Elbe to visit Prebischtor, the largest natural stone bridge in Europe, where we were charged €2 (£1.70) to look at the view. Then we visited the Kamenice river, where we were charged to walk along the riverbank (with light filtering to the ferny sides of the canyon – it was worth it). Finally, we were charged to negotiate the gorge, where a sombrero-wearing boatman punted us through the glades with many a trick, including tugging a rope to trigger a waterfall. (This was not the only automated waterfall we saw: at Lichtenhain Wasserfall, an attraction since the 1850s, water cascaded over the rocks every half-hour, accompanied by a burst of Vangelis.)

On our last day we climbed Schrammsteine. We crossed the Elbe at Krippen on a ferry and walked through Postelwitz, with its restored timbered houses. The steps then started up again, but the ordeal was leavened by early blackberries beside the path. Next was a flight of wooden steps through woodland. At this point, there was no one around. But by the time we'd reached Schrammsteinstor, the gateway, the numbers began to increase, and when we made the last ascent up ladders and ramps, it was like Piccadilly Circus.

But the view was wondrous: we could see all the peaks we had climbed and walked between, and they were impressively distant. It was our highest day, too: 1,173 steps from our starting point beside the Elbe. I was still counting.

Traveller's Guide

Getting there

Stena Line (0870 570 7070; www.stenaline.co.uk) operates sea crossings between Harwich and the Hook of Holland.

Return sailings with a vehicle cost from £190 for two in a two-berth cabin. Pirna is eight hours' drive away. Dresden is served by BA (0844 493 0787; www.ba.com) from Gatwick.

Getting around

Augustus Tours (00 49 3 51 563 48 20; http://www.augustustours.de) offers seven-night walking tours of the Saxon Switzerland park for €399 (£333) per person.

More information

Saxon Switzerland Tourism: 00 49 3 501 470 147; www.saechsische-schweiz.de. The Saxony Tourism office is at 45 Bautzner Strasse in Dresden (00 49 3 51 491 700; www.saxonytourism.com).