Love snow, hate skiing?

Hooves clopping, bells a-jangle, craggy granite and a nightscape of chalet eaves gliding by ... if you want to see the Swiss village of Kandersteg at its romantic best, I can highly recommend a nice long

I'd been desperate for a Pferdeschlittenfahrt ever since I saw it advertised on the hotel noticeboard, above an explanatory sketched stallion pulling a sledful of folk. And finally, here we were! A merry throng of guests from the Victoria and Ritter, living the halfhour dream from under cowhide knee blankets: marvelling at the church, the cheese shop, the railway sidings, the outskirts, and the lever that enabled the driver to discreetly raise the whole sleigh on tyres, since the village actually had no snow.

That's often the misconception with chocolate-boxy high places - that you come in winter for much of the vertical white stuff, or you don't come at all. Well not so with Kandersteg, the time-warped ski resort in the Swiss Alps, an hour from Bern.

Which isn't to say the snow is less than perfect for pisteheads beyond the village and way up the slopes, where the chair lift and cable car ply. It's just that, between December and April, you don't have to ski here to be here. After all, it was the Swiss who gave the world fresh air and fondue sets.

Diminutive, hemmed in by heartstirring pines and heart-monitor topography, Kandersteg in winter is not unlike a bijou Proven?al village in summer, only freezing. There are two tiny churches with pointy bonnets, a scattering of twinkly taverns announced in twee lettering, and local stores festooned with fatmarbled sausages, managed by proprietors as round as their cheeses. The Victoria - the village's original hotel, dating from the 19th century's first infatuation with skiing - even manages a warm 'n' welcoming decor of Brigitte Bardotskin upholstery and Goldilocks chairs with hearts punched out of the back.

Gliding in conveniently from City Airport to Bern on a Swisswings 31-seater apparently fired from an elastic band, our initiation into Swiss wine (that's right, Swiss wine) that first bracing afternoon was a chilled white by the name of Fendant de Saillon. It was so deliciously tongue-tingling it could have been a beakerful of the French south, had it not been served before the crackling grate of an Alpine auberge with a gingham-framed view of icy peaks and a mysterious frozen lake, Oeschinensee, somewhere below.

As non-skiers with a slightly juvenile passion for snow, we'd reached this spot Janet-and-John style, following the hotel's instructions, aboard old-school toboggans touted for hire at the top of an antediluvian lift, which creaked sheerly from the village for hundreds of feet like a skein of airborne Sunday school chairs. In honeyed, varnished wood, the toboggan soon proved a thing of steadfastness and beauty - the mule and the golden retriever of the transport world. With a gentle giddy-up it will shimmy you down perilously steep ways in search of a beer. But if, when you disembark to take a picture, you don't hold its leash tight, it may scoot away over a slope, as if chasing a stick you've thrown.

It seems unlikely that many Kandersteg grown-ups really travel by toboggan. What you will see, however, is locals advancing across white vistas, silhouetted and attached to poles, like Indonesian shadow puppets in bobble hats. This is a popular winter transport mode called langlauf - or cross country skiing - and though you'll never believe it if you try it, they say it's the best way to get around after a massive dump in the night.

Next morning, the hotel organised us a langlauf session with Urs,

a wiry instructor who dwelt atop a giant snowy summit accessed by a cable car straight out of Ian Fleming. As thick flakes swirled, he got us shod then spent the morning issuing instructions along the lines of: "You put your weightski on your frontski and take it off your backski?; and: "Make like you're running without moving your shoulders.? Careering into another snowdrift, I suddenly saw the beauty of buses.

SNOWSHOES, donned that afternoon, proved marginally easier - like walking around on a pair of mini sun loungers - then it was back to the ranch for a night of fondue and plum brandy ice cream set to a pleasant soundtrack of live accordion music delivered by an olde villager from central casting.

For the benefit of anyone too young to recall the Seventies, fondue is a communal dish which involves spearing dry bread cubes on long forks and doing swashbuckling battle in a vat of volcanic cheese. It's that simple - and fattening - and, sure enough, the minute the goo ran low, everybody was fondue-fighting. And, let me tell you, it was a little bit frightening.

There is only one way to deal with a fondue hangover - ie, that spare tyre dangling below your belt the following morning - and that's go for a brisk, crisp walk. Here Kandersteg really comes into its own: simply pull on your boots, brandish your Alpenstock und jawohl! Away you go.

Ascending the cable car again, sights set on the lonely Berghotel Schwarenbach - a former toll station, far, far away - we hiked for two miles or more across thickly snowbound pastures; then up and

up and, for another half an hour, up. You really felt like something to eat by the time you reached the summit. I felt like an enormous jelly.

On the shiveringly stone terrace of the hotel - its loftier through traffic numbering Picasso (in rambler's mode), and Guy de Maupassant (en passant) - there soon arrived mountains of rösti (fried grated potato) and cold, clear beer through which to view the dazzling dentistry of sharp, white peaks. And so, as we commenced the weary trudge back, I tried to convince myself of the benefit of all this exercise. But deep down I knew just what we all needed: a nice long Pferdeschlittenfahrt.

Way to go Nick Redman travelled to Kandersteg with Inntravel (01653 629010). Three nights at the Hotel Victoria cost from £368pp half board, including flights from London City on Swisswings.