I’m not sure when the plan to walk across Southern Bosnia from Sarajevo to Medjugorje originally germinated. My mother and I had talked about visiting the famous pilgrim destination, but she had died before we could go. Now I wanted to do it in her memory. Sticking to the notion of traditional pilgrimage, I planned to walk, if not the whole way, at least the last leg of the journey in Bosnia. A friend who’d served in the peace-keeping force there after the vicious civil war of the 1990s suggested a route across two ranges of mountains and the River Neretva, via Mostar. However, no detailed maps were available, and I thought I’d better check it at the Bosnian Embassy. I found the tall stone building in a Victorian terrace off London’s Gloucester Road. I walked up the steps to knock tentatively on a firmly closed door. After a few moments it was opened to reveal two surly young men in ill-fitting grey suits which, I wildly imagined, could easily have concealed small weapons.

‘What you want?’ one asked curtly in strong Slavic tones.

‘Sorry to trouble you,’ I mumbled, ‘I’m planning to visit your country and I wanted some information.

‘Consulate next door.’ With a short nod, the man indicated the building to his left, and closed the door.

Unimpressed, I retreated down the stone steps and spotted a sign to the Consulate. I let myself straight into a lobby containing a few posters and no people, until the man who’d failed to welcome me in the Embassy strolled in. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he asked with an unctuous smile.

I pretended I’d never seen him before. ‘I hope so. I’m planning to walk from Sarajevo to Medjugorje and I wondered if you had any maps or details of places to stay.’

He looked appalled. ‘Why you want to walk? There is a train. Or a bus!’

‘It’s a kind of pilgrimage,’ I explained.

He shook his head. ‘Not safe to walk. There are mines still in much of the forest, and the fields. No rule of law in mountains.’ He dismissed the whole idea with a flip of his hand.

I left the consulate frustrated, but not discouraged. I opened my phone and rang Jimmy.

Jimmy had done 20 years in the SAS. He’d left the regiment 15 years before, and, between security jobs, had taken up serious walking, finishing the Camino de Santiago several times, once covering the 1,500 miles from his birthplace near Edinburgh.

‘Jimmy,’ I came swiftly to the point. ‘Have you got a spare couple of weeks to come walking with me across Bosnia?’

‘Sure,’ he answered promptly. ‘I’ve never been to the Balkans.’

A month later as we chugged north up the Croatian coast in a rackety ferry on our way home, we agreed we had just experienced the finest walk of our lives.

Luckily, we’d missed all the mines; and we hadn’t been shot.