The trail of head torches twinkled between cloud and rock above us, slowly gaining height, disappearing one by one into the pre-dawn darkness. They were on their way to the summit of western Europe’s highest mountain, and I longed to follow.

The previous evening in the Refuge de Tête Rousse, the first overnight stop on the usual route up Mont Blanc, there had been an army of Gore-Tex-clad men, recounting summit stories while comparing the latest technical gear. Huddled in the corner, mountain guide Karen Bockel, filmmaker Grace Taylorson Smith Pritchard and I, the only women in the room, were weighing up our options. A storm was rolling in.

“We will need to skip the second night in the hut above, continue straight to the summit and come all the way back down before the storm hits at lunchtime,” said Karen. “I’m sorry Lise, but I don’t know if you’ll be fast enough in those hobnail boots and that bonnet . . . ”

The history of adventure has mostly been written by men, and still today the narrative is mainly told in male voices, whether through books, television or social media. My project, Woman with Altitude, aims to highlight women adventurers from history who achieved astonishing feats but whose lack of visibility continues to have knock-on effects for women in the outdoor world. Only around 2 per cent of fully certified mountain guides are women; our guide Karen, who teaches at Chamonix’s renowned École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme, told us that out of the 44 students who graduated this year, only two were female. All too often we still find ourselves the only women in a hut full of men.

Previous trips have included following in the footsteps of Alexandra David-Néel in Sikkim and Jane Inglis Clark in the Scottish Highlands, but from the hundreds of adventurous women I’ve researched, I was particularly drawn to Henriette d’Angeville. In 1838, she became the second woman to reach the summit of Mont Blanc — and the first to do so unaided (Marie Paradis reached the top in 1808 but was carried some of the way by guides).

Mountaineering was not an activity for women in the early 19th century, and in her memoir My Ascent of Mont Blanc, Henriette writes that news of her planned attempt caused “a general outcry of amazement and disapproval, followed by, she must be prevented from such madness”. In The Summits of Modern Man (2013) Peter Hansen calls her a “gender radical” who challenged the status quo — “by making the ascent at all, she occupied a transgressive position”. Yet, she did it anyway, setting off to “a chorus of good wishes from a disapproving crowd”.

In the footsteps of . . . 

This is the latest in a series in which writers are guided by a notable earlier traveller. For more, see ft.com/footsteps

To understand what Henriette and women like her would have gone through, I recreate their expeditions using clothing and equipment available to them at the time. This is how I found myself down a cobbled London street in early August, collecting boots from Tricker’s, which was founded in 1829 and made boots for some of the first explorers and alpinists. Its master shoemaker Adele Williamson expertly crafted the leather sole for my boots, including a metal horseshoe heel and hobnails hammered in for grip.

In the early 19th century, outdoor clothing for women didn’t exist, so Henriette created her impressive outfit herself, carefully documenting it in her journal. Controversially, it included a pair of trousers — though these would be hidden by a Scottish woollen dress. The complete outfit weighed 12kg and “everyone declared, feeling the weight of it in their hands, that I could not walk for even half an hour so caparisoned!”

With only notes and pencil drawings from Henriette’s expedition to go on, I took some artistic licence with the colours for my own version, opting for a Scottish tweed of yellow, red and green, all common colours of the 1830s. To finish the ensemble, I added a matching bonnet, silk-and-wool stockings, a black feather boa like Henriette’s, and even Victorian undergarments with a buttoned crotch (very useful indeed).

Henriette also packed 24 roast chickens, 18 bottles of wine and a carrier pigeon, to deliver the good news of her reaching the summit. Her only piece of “technical” equipment was her alpenstock, a traditional staff with a sharp metal point, adorned with a chamois horn for hooking on to rocks. Without the luxury of porters chiselling foot holes for me in the ice, my only modern kit was crampons, which I felt justified using where necessary.

As our train pulled into Chamonix on August 29, the weather was far too hot for a 12kg woollen outfit. More seriously, it was too hot to climb Mont Blanc. When Henriette arrived here in September 1838, snowstorms threatened her summit attempt. Now, we had the opposite problem, a series of warm summers melting the permafrost and prompting increased rockfall — particularly in the Grand Couloir, across which climbers must dash on the main route to the top.

We started with four days of training in the mountains around Chamonix, tackling peaks such as the Aiguille du Tour and getting used to crossing glaciers and navigating deep crevasses. In the pink morning light, I teetered out from the Refuge Albert Premier on to the Glacier du Tour, dressed in my outfit for the first time. The hobnails scraped on the rocks, so I drove the sharp point of my alpenstock into the hard ice, steadying my balance. It was a surprisingly effective replacement for a modern ice axe.

The next day, while hanging off a rock overlooking the Pèlerins glacier near the top of the famous Aiguille du Midi, I found myself doing battle with the bonnet. Its oversized brim caught on the rock faces as I looked up or down, knocking me backwards and making it impossible to see my feet. On steeper sections I had to hitch the dress to my waist to avoid stepping on the hem as I pushed upwards.

A sudden drop in temperature allowed us to take our chance with Mont Blanc. Initially, I wanted to walk from Chamonix on Henriette’s original route, but with a short window of opportunity we couldn’t afford the additional eight hours. Instead, it was into the cable car at Les Houches with the rest of the climbers on the modern route, then the Tramway du Mont Blanc to the Nid d’Aigle at 2,372 metres, where we’d begin our ascent.

After days of training with heavy crampons, my feet were a state. It was harder to trust the hobnails on the sharp rocks and steeper ledges, and my steps were slow. It should have only been a two-hour climb, but it was four weary hours before we slumped into the Refuge de Tête Rousse at 3,167 metres.

At 3.30am the next morning, as we prepared to leave in the cold pre-dawn hours to avoid rockfall, Karen assessed the latest updates on the approaching storm. Reluctantly, we accepted that it would be foolish to push on, though it was tough to watch the other climbers head out in their modern gear as I sat alone in my woollen outfit, the very thing that had ruined my chances of summiting.

Following a disheartening descent, Karen and Grace convinced me all was not lost. After her success on Mont Blanc — on the summit the guides interlocked arms to make a platform so that she could climb on top and thus reach “a height which, pace masculine pride, was never attained by my predecessors” — Henriette became a dedicated climber for the next 25 years, a career that culminated, aged 69, on Switzerland’s Oldenhorn. We decided to head there, driving from Chamonix over the border to the village of Les Diablerets. From there, a cable car takes tourists up to the Glacier 3000 ski area in the shadow of the lonely 3,123-metre peak, but unfortunately for Karen, Grace and my feet, I insisted we walk up, just as Henriette did.

Away from the busy car park, late Alpine flowers were in full bloom, filling the mountainside with patches of hazy pinks and purples. As we followed the path, feasting on wild raspberries, I thought of Henriette’s description: “Nothing spoke of the earth as we know it. I felt I had been transported into a new world . . . A voice spoke to me from the sky and said: Do what is right, and follow your path with confidence.”

To the hum of machines building a new ski lodge, we buckled up our crampons and crossed the glacier. The storm that ended our chances of Mont Blanc caught up with us just as we tackled the last rocky section of ascent, four hours of climbing on slippery granite. We reached the summit in a cloud of mist, unable to see our surroundings, but I didn’t mind. Maybe none of this was about the glory of getting to the top and gorging on the views.

In the past two weeks, four more climbers have lost their lives attempting to summit Mont Blanc. It’s a stark reminder of how unpredictable high mountains are, even with the latest technology to guide us. And it underlines the achievements of early alpinists like Henriette, the risks they were taking and their bravery in pushing boundaries, not only physically and mentally but, for women, culturally too.

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Karl Marx, Hans Holbein, George Frideric Handel, Kai Havertz: some Germans do their best work in London. This, plus Germans being, in my experience, the best English-speakers on the continent, can feed the sense that these are kindred countries, despite the first half of the last century.

But Germany specialises in manufacturing. Britain is the second-biggest exporter of services in the world. Germany has a spread of important regions. Britain is more dominated by its main city than perhaps any rich nation of significant size. Germany has coalition governments, with three parties in the current one. British politics is so winner-takes-all that Keir Starmer got a 174-seat majority from a 34 per cent vote share. Germany’s fiscal policy is prudent to a fault. Britain has not run a budget surplus since the turn of the millennium. Germany is federal. Britain is centralised. Germany was a founding member of the European project. Britain joined late and left.

Even the texture of life in these countries is exactly different. You can ride a space-age train across Germany and then see someone using a fax machine on a non-ironic basis. Britain is better digitised but less good at tangible infrastructure.

These are two distinct, in fact almost oppositional, ways of running a medium-sized, high-income democracy. Yet both are converging on one thing: failure. Britain’s troubles are more famous and chronic, while Germany’s might be more acute. It was the worst-performing major economy in 2023. Its once-serene politics are deteriorating.

The lesson? Never idealise other countries. It feels like a cosmopolitan thing to do, but it is the ultimate in parochialism. The left are repeat offenders. The Sweden-worship of the 1990s was credulous enough. But during the Angela Merkel era, Germany was Shangri-La for UK and US progressives, who hailed proportional representation over brute majoritarianism, industrial strategy over laissez-faire, soft power over Anglo-American militarism. Berlin itself — a hipper and less gilded city than London or New York — became proof of concept.

Well, time has complicated the picture. Multi-party government, it seems, can bring indecision. Shaping the economy can mean backing existing industries over emergent ones. Soft power can be a euphemism for naivety in the face of mortal enemies. Having lots of fine cities but no megalopolis can mean forgoing the economic benefits of agglomeration.

Never idealise other countries. It feels like a cosmopolitan thing to do, but it is the ultimate in parochialism

When two such different countries get into such similar ruts at the same time, we should doubt if there is a “right” model. What there are are trade-offs. Apart from the basics — property rights, tax collection, universal public services, and so on — almost no policy is an unqualified good. Making one thing better will tend to make another thing worse. Leadership is a matter of choosing which problems to have.

Germany’s choices weren’t wrong. It is still richer than Britain. But if the costs and perverse outcomes were hard to anticipate in Germany, imagine how much harder from abroad. This is the inherent risk of adoring foreign exemplars. The UK and especially the US are set on emulating industrial strategy, but without the pedigree for it, or sufficient awareness of its mixed track record.

In the end, which of these two unalike countries is in more trouble? Economically, Britain. Germany carries less public debt. Its quest to make fewer machine parts and more advanced technologies is entirely doable over time. There is the cushion of the European single market.

On the political score, though, Germany’s extremism problem is worse. It has a Kremlin-smitten far left, not just the most strident of the major hard-right parties in Europe. And the advantage of Britain’s Napoleonic centralisation is a ruthless decisiveness. A bad prime minister or two can (and did) wreck things. But a first-class one would get the country moving again.

For better or worse, France is Britain’s real twin: in per capita income, in maritime exposure, in being a unified state for so long, in hoarding so much in its capital, in having lost a vast extra-European empire. A Tale of Two Cities is not about London and Munich. Even that Anglo-German point of contact, football, is a laughable mismatch. Germany has four World Cups to England’s one. The fascination in this bilateral relationship lies in the (peaceful) contrast. How droll, then, that when the two sides arrive at last at something in common, it is national malaise.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

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LUCY Letby is set to challenge her most recent conviction for murdering seven babies and trying to kill seven more, the Court of Appeal revealed yesterday.

The nurse, 34, is serving 15 whole-life orders for her year-long killing spree while working on a neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, Cheshire.

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Court staff confirmed that Letby is bringing a bid to appeal against her conviction for one count of attempted murder in July.

Judges will consider the case at a hearing on October 24, according to court listings.

Letby previously launched an appeal to challenge her guilty verdicts for seven murders and six attempted murders, which was rejected in May.

A month later she was later sentenced to an additional whole-life order for the attempted murder of a baby girl after a retrial at Manchester crown court.

A public inquiry into the events surrounding Letby’s crimes, chaired by judge Lady Justice Thirlwall, is ongoing at Liverpool Town Hall and is expected to last into 2025.