Forging A Bond On A Mürren Mountain Top

 SKIERS have a very special bond with Mürren – and it's more than just a tortured pun because of 007 and a stunning James Bond movie showdown in a revolving, mountain-top restaurant.

The charming, traffic-free village in the heart of the Bernese Oberland has the unique claim to fame as the place where modern Alpine ski racing was born way back in the 1920s, thanks to well-heeled English chaps who have enjoyed throwing themselves down Swiss slopes one way or another for the past 150 years.

You can get close to the film by posing with life-size cut-outs of George Lazenby

It's long been a 'must-visit' place and I've looked at it many times from neighbouring Wengen on the other side of the deep glacial valley between them, promising that one day, I'd make the trip and head for the Schilthorn summit and its Piz Gloria restaurant.

Never quite had the time to make it, until this season… and it was all the more memorable because by sheer accident, I happened to meet the great-grandson of the man who inspired a worldwide phenomenon.

We had caught an early morning cable car and cog railway train to reach the village from our base in Lauterbrunnen and then walked the main street to the Schilthornbahn cablecar station for the two-stage ride to the summit, meeting up with lift company sales chief Alan Ramsay, a Scot who has lived in Mürren for the last 24 years and has a huge smile to prove it.

As we filed in, Alan greeted another smiling, perma-tanned resident and introduced me to Stephen Lunn, grandson of Sir Arnold Lunn, who invented the first modern slalom in 1922 and whose memorial bust stands in front of the village railway station.

He also founded the Kandahar ski racing club in 1924, which in turn led to the legendary Inferno downhill race for amateurs – still being run to this day – and staged the first World Championships in1931.

Stephen's great-grandfather, Sir Henry Simpson Lunn, is the man who kicked it all off when he organised the first inclusive tours to Switzerland in winter, rather than just the summer, and went on to set up the giant Lunn Poly holiday company.

There must be something in the genes because Stephen's father led the British team in the 1936 Winter Olympics, competed regularly in the Inferno until he was badly injured in a car crash when he was 90, and carried on skiing until a year before his death at 97. Echoes of James Bond again, for he was also a famous MI6 spymaster in the Cold War, credited with pioneering some super-snooping via tunnels under the Berlin Wall.

Stephen himself has been skiing almost since he could walk and shares with Alan the all-year-round tan – and the smile that goes with it – to underline that they are Mürren locals and love every moment they spend there. They're also happy to share that love with visitors, also generously sharing their knowledge about the best runs and the best views in what indeed turned out to be a very special place.

Stephen tore off to enjoy part of the Inferno terrain he's skied for years but never tires of, while we stopped off at the interim cablecar station and restaurant at Birg for a different sort of thrill, walking out onto the sun terrace in glorious weather to take in awesome views of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau against the clear blue skies over Wengen.

Not the only thrill, though, for we then took a few steps down from the terrace onto the newly-built Skyline Walk, a cantilevered extension to the sun-deck, with a see-through steel mesh and glass floor sticking out over a vertical precipice. Queasy does it!

Hearts still thumping, we boarded the cablecar for the final dramatic link to the Piz Gloria with a soundtrack of the Bond theme almost drowned out by delighted Japanese tourists, who were even more delighted by the impressive and highly-entertaining Bond World 007 experience underneath the restaurant complex.

This high-octane attraction means you can step behind the scenes of  the classic On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which you can also see in the 40-seater cinema, and even step into some of the scenes and take a photo or DVD home with you. Hands-on highlights include the cockpit of one of the helicopters from the film which you can 'fly' through the mountains, and a bobsleigh simulator you can leap into and then watch a video of yourself careering down the ice in hail of bullets with a gun in your hand.

Once back outside, the view of the mountains is far and away better than any film can come close to, although you can get close to the film again by posing with life-size cut-outs of  Bond star George Lazenby – and no, I couldn't resist!

The cut-outs share the terrace where the spy and a bevy of Bond beauties indulged in a spot of curling; and inside the smart, stylish restaurant you're again in film territory with some  original features retained from the 1969 hit.

Well worth the trip alone is the sheer indulgence of sitting in a seat by the windows and enjoying a meal or a 007 coffee, no less, while the entire outer section of the restaurant slowly rotates, giving you a slowly changing panorama of some of the most astonishing scenery in the world, starring the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, of course, along with an estimated 200 other peaks on a clear day. Thankfully, we did have a clear day – and it's absolutely amazing.

A leisurely lunch over, with thanks to Alan, we headed back to the cablecar, with the (very welcome!) excuse that high winds meant we couldn't follow in Bond's tracks and ski back down on a black run with a top pitch as steep as plummeting down the side of a house, before it joins the Inferno piste and runs down to Mürren. 

If you're really keen and there's enough snow, you can even keep going and ski all the way down to the village of Lauterbrunnen in the valley bottom, where we were staying at the family-run chalet-style Hotel Silberhorn. 

From there, it was just a few minutes' walk to the cable car station for Mürren or the train station for Wengen, but on a drizzly last morning, we opted for a road trip to Meiringen – official birthplace of the meringue around the year 1600, I kid you not –  to gain some altitude and swap the rain for snow for a short hiking expedition.

We did just that, in spades, after we headed for the protected Schwarzwaldalp high above the floor of the Hasli valley. Within moments of leaving the village along a steep, narrow lane, our guide Emil had to get the snow chains on his compact 4x4, and within another few hundred yards we could barely make out the road. 

White knuckles in the white-out for a few more kilometres and then we reached the Schwarzwaldalp Hotel at 1,450 metres, fortified ourselves with a hot coffee and set off in almost knee-deep powder for a stroll (!) across meadows and between isolated chalets and farm buildings, including mini-chalets on stilts where artisan cheeses are stored to mature.

After that bracing experience, it was back to Meiringen, where we just had time to visit a life-size statue of Sherlock Holmes – and discover a rather spooky link to the day we started.

It seems that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was determined to kill off his detective hero, was on holiday in the Haslitel area with a chum, who suggested that the nearby Reichenbach Falls would be the idea place to see him off and take his arch-enemy Moriarty with him.

Doyle's inventive friend, it turns out, was Sir Henry Simpson Lunn.

Dave Graham is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers and a writer/advisor with SilverTravelAdvisor.com