The sound of cowbells tinkles upwards from the alpage, the high mountain pasture where Hérens cattle graze during the summer, and even up here, above 8,000 feet, the sun feels warm on my face.

I’ve been walking on the mountain paths for an hour, and the icy wind, blowing off the tongue of the Aletsch Glacier, feels welcome and refreshing as it meets the sweat beading on my brow.

“The Aletsch Glacier is melting, and melting fast,” says my guide Patrizio Perino Fontana sadly. “But even today, if it was melted down it could give a litre of water to the entire world’s population every year for three years.” It brings home the sheer majestic scale of the Aletsch: a snaking highway of rock-strewn ice, 2km wide and 20km long, which is the largest glacier in the Alps.

From its source – the Konkordiaplatz, a junction of four glaciers at the foot of the Jungfrau in the Bernese Alps – it moves forward around 200 metres per year. Standing above it now, I can hear it creaking and groaning, sounding first like a chair being dragged along a tiled floor, then like a dead branch creaking and cracking in the wind.

Sometimes it even seems to produce animal sounds: the croaking and low shuffling of a murder of crows. It’s a disorientating effect, giving the feeling that the earth might suddenly slip beneath our feet.

The glacier’s imitation of life is not limited to its slithering movement through the Swiss Alps, however. It eats things, too: vehicles, boulders, the bodies of unfortunate climbers and hikers who have perished on the ice.

‘As the glacier melts it throws up all the things it ate over the years – rocks, people, even planes,’ says Patrizio. ‘Recently they found the bones of four brothers who had an accident here 70 years ago.’ A couple of years earlier, in the summer of 2022, the remains of a Piper Cherokee aircraft, which vanished in the area in 1968, began to emerge from the melting ice, along with the personal effects of its passengers – a battered tin of Nivea cream, a glasses case, a hat.

I skipped breakfast this morning, and it shows – all this talk of eating planes is making me hungry. Happily, it’s lunchtime, and we’ve almost arrived at our destination: the Panorama-Restaurant, a space-age construction some 2,700 metres above sea level on the slopes of the Bettmerhorn.

We take a table on the terrace, where, on this sunny day, we can see out to some of the region’s famous 4,000-metre peaks – the Dom, the Weisshorn, and the mighty Matterhorn, reaching into the sky like a frostbitten pyramid.

‘Cholera’. It’s not a word to stoke the appetite, but right on cue, a waiter arrives with two plates of hearty, cheesy deliciousness: layers of pastry, potatoes, leeks and onions, bejewelled with slices of apple and oozing with melted raclette cheese, the pride of Valais cuisine.

This hearty mountain pie was originally cobbled together from whatever ingredients people had in the larder when they were compelled to stay indoors by a cholera epidemic in 1836; another theory holds that the name comes from cholu, the Valais German word for coal, because the dish was originally cooked on hot coals. Whatever the etymology, it’s perfect grub to fuel adventures in the mountains: hearty, filling and wholesome, not to mention lip-smackingly delicious.

Hard as it is to tear ourselves away from the table, Patrizio wants to show me a couple of the region’s famous sights. We hop on a gondola – the Aletsch Explorer card allows for full access to the Aletsch Arena’s extensive, efficient cable-car network – and take a scenic 10-minute journey south to the village of Bettmeralp, with Patrizio pointing out the furry rumps of chamois, the Alpine goat-antelope, several of which are perched improbably on a razor-thin mountain ledge.

We disembark at Bettmeralp and walk through the quiet village, with modern chalets of spruce and larch rising above centuries-old raccards, the wooden granaries which are an emblem of Valais architecture. Our destination is the Church of Saint Mary of the Snow, a simple black-roofed chapel, accessed by a path lined with the flags of the 26 Swiss cantons, its simple whitewashed interior adorned with gilded statues of the Virgin Mary.

…and set against the backdrop of the Valais’ 4,000-metre peaks, it’s a spectacularly sited church, and one of two stops in the Aletsch Arena which form part of Switzerland’s Grand Tour – a network of unmissable photo stops. The other one in the Aletsch is the Eggishorn viewpoint, which provides a magnificent panorama over the Aletsch Glacier as it snakes its way through the mountains.

The final stop on our day’s Aletsch adventure sees us using another feature of the area’s excellent public transport, this time boarding the electric Aletsch-Express bus (the whole Aletsch Arena is car-free) for a scenic 20-minute journey west to Riederalp. From here, it’s a short walk to Villa Cassel, a magnificent half-timbered chateau from 1902 which was once the home of wealthy English banker Ernest Cassel.

Perched on an alpine ridge, the villa boasts magnificent views over the forests and mountains of the Valais, and Cassel’s high-profile friends flocked here in pursuit of peace and quiet. A young Winston Churchill visited repeatedly between 1904 and 1913, working on a biography of his father, before returning decades later to write his own memoir.

The villa is now a hotel open to overnight guests, and the opulent parquet floors, spiral staircases and brass beds which Churchill would have recognised from his time here remain today.

Hungry after a day’s tiring adventures in the outdoors, though, I’m here for another reason than simply to admire the architecture. “You have to try the cake,” says Patrizio as we sit in the wood-ceilinged café. “It’s the best in the Aletsch region.” I oblige, ordering a delicious tart topped with apricots.

These fruits, another famous speciality of the region, ripen in midsummer – and that feels true, as I look through window, of the whole Valais…