Ostensibly, this is Drasdo's autobiography - an account of his ordinary route through life - but apparently, it refused to sit easily even in that most flexible of genres, for 'the book would have nothing to do with it'. Instead (and more like a novelist describing his art), Drasdo tell us that he was surprised by 'the shape of the book', and by silences': he was troubled by 'insistent voices' and had no choice other than to 'copy out what they said'.

So what is the shape of the book? It is divided into four sections which contain twenty-two essays - several of which have appeared in 'earlier drafts' in journals and magazines. Somewhat surprisingly however, he includes none of his highly-praised writing for the CC Journal: and his seminal paper on the philosophy and aesthetics of mountain education, Education & the Mountain Centres (which is almost impossible to find now), appears only as an assimilated echo. There is neither index, nor bibliography and there are no footnotes or photographs. So, had Drasdo deliberately set himself at a huge distance from the traditional autobiography and given himself a handicap to start with? And if so, why?

Well, to start with, this is not a book which places its author's experience sequentially from playground swing to climbing sling. Nor does it offer us the author delving self- consciously into his own psyche or those of his friends and relations, seeking for causal explanations of why he chose to climb (if there are several apocryphal Peter Greenwood stories for example, no attempt is made to examine him under the microscope: and the most personal and in some ways, most moving of revelations about Drasdo's relationship with his parents closes the book rather than opens it). Yet, despite discounting these obvious parameters of the genre, The Ordinary Route is one of the most quietly - challenging and profound of autobiographies ever written by a British climber.

Drasdo claims he is a very ordinary author: 'an alternative historian, a village philosopher, a man who's kept his head above water more by luck than judgement', 'village', 'luck' - are characteristic of his style, definitive of his intention and the source of much of the wry, often self-deprecating humour in the book. There is no big parade here of the big-tick routes or big-tick partnerships: and the very coat hooks upon which a standard climbing autobiography would normally be hung - 'My highest mountain, my nearest miss, my most agonising decision ...(my most) deeply satisfying alpine ascents' - have 'resisted inclusion'. Why leave out these obvious mountaineering touchstones? Well, Drasdo's intention is gradually revealed as much more ambitious and analytic: it is to subject his own climbing experience itself to scrutiny and thus find 'the unacknowledged value in what we take as commonplace'. The change of pronoun to 'we', here, is telling: he seeks to generalise from his own experience and offer us all, 'the ordinary as rich and strange'. The Shakespearean metaphor from The Tempest is also deliberate: he wants to transform his ordinary experience using 'imagination and reading' and a 'long time-span of engagement with a variety of terrains and conditions'. This is the considered agenda of a man who has spent 50 years thinking through his climbing by writing about it.

Drasdo is much more than a good descriptive writer, though: he is a shrewd political commentator: a practised defender of the public right to roam (c.f. the essay, 'Access': 'What we wanted ... the freedom to walk anywhere on uncultivated land') and a well-read and active conservationist (c.f. the major 18 page essay entitled 'Conservation'). He's also much more than a 'village' philosopher in these pages (perhaps with the possible exception of Phil Bartlett, he is the only British climbing writer with the credentials to be a philosopher of climbing), scrutinising many of the most contentious issues that currently beset modern climbing with rigour and relish. It is worth reading The Ordinary Route for these reasons alone.

He is particularly good, for instance, at teasing out all the inconsistent and counter cases in an argument and he can take a subject that is potentially rather dry - such as guidebooks and, because it is dear to his he(art) as a writer and climber, show its essential characteristics and significance with wit and clarity of thought. What is written in guides, he tells us, conditions our responses to cliffs and climbs and therefore to ourselves as writers and climbers. As we learn the relief and detail of a crag, for instance, we quite literally 'harness it with words'. The history of our sport is thus very much the history of climbing language itself. Drasdo loves reading maps - as you would expect - devoting a chapter to 'On Getting Lost', in which language itself is the map whereby we find both where and who we are in relation to the mountain map. 'We could find no object to which we could attach a few words to say where we'd lain down'.

Though the autobiographical details pop up unchronologically throughout the book, Drasdo's more personal 'attempt to make sense' of his own experience begins on page 63 - the last page of an essay entitled 'An End'. This essay, marking the death of Drasdo's contemporary, Arthur Dolphin, when Drasdo was himself in Courmayer, stands as a marker. Before it, in the first five essays, are many of the details of early life and climbing in Yorkshire and The Lakes. Packed with vignettes of those men and women who made up The Yorkshire Climbers (Mountaineering Club) and The Bradford Lads - those days when climbing was 'an oral culture' - memories of National Service in Greece and of hitch- hiking, they compliment chapters in Dennis Gray's Rope Boy and Don Whillans's Portrait of a Mountaineer, if you want a comprehensive social picture of the time.

But it is the transformatory power of language upon experience which excites him most. Each essay contains an 'epiphany' (definition: 'a moment of manifestation of supernatural reality'): but there is nothing of the supernatural in his recollected experience. His observations are very much rooted in our reality - the mountain reality of closely-observing climbers, everywhere: and with Eliot, he knows that ' The business of the poet is not to seek for... new emotions to express, but to use the ordinary ones...'.

A good example of this, and of his distinctive style, is to be found in the extract from the essay 'On Unplanned Bivouacs', published in this edition of the CC Journal. An apparently commonplace story of death in the mountains, it opens with a deliberate leak of the narrative tension before modulation, via a focused revelation about the power of nature (the epiphany) into a profound generalisation about (our) experience of a bivouac. Here, in Eliot's words again, is 'neither emotion, nor recollection' but a 'fusion' of both. We can see, too, how a photograph would not help him - here or elsewhere: the pictorial qualities of this and other pieces would be diminished by the singularity of an image. For the power of that 'ordinary' dawn to provide a lasting effect on both writer and reader, the imagery must be preserved by words alone.

Drasdo saves his best work for his most treasured experiences - which clearly still continue to exercise his imagination and memory. The essays at the heart of the book are akin to sustained meditations in their measured an studied intensity. Always with some rock at their heart, they are refined recollections which unite dream-time with the reality of intense experience. Here, where we get as close to the ideal forms as Plato will allow him to, the act of climbing loses the foreground, giving way to a deeper engagement with mountains, to a sort of spiritual search for the reverberating heart of things. Drasdo writes of these places as he apprehended them and as they are now, in memory: thus he offers us 'the real remembered thing'. So, an 'ordinary' walk up Gebel Musa (reputedly, the Mount Sinai of Biblical fame) leads him to the 'miraculous sanctuary of Elijah's hollow', the discovery of a 'climber's paradise as perfect as any I've seen': but also the realisation that to 'work out routes, here, over the pilgrims' heads, would be an act of the grossesst insensitivity'. Another of his 'most memorable days', on Bon Echo Rock in Canada, ends with a discovery of 'sermons in stones' (Algonquin Indian pictographs) which counterpoints the later near destruction of his canoe by a falling rock and a night paddle home that might have been fatal. He writes then of several visits (pilgrimages?) over the years, to The Poisoned Glen in Ireland, where climbs on Bearnas Buttress, in 'the hills... robed in mystery', lead to 'dreams... in a west impossibly displaced, (where) there was another area we hadn't yet looked at. And beyond that...'. He concludes, close to home, on Arenig Fawr, where his is still seeking experiences in and out of the ordinary.

The Ordinary Route is a demanding read at times. Some of the trains of thought Drasdo follows, lead him into empty stations: and there are moments when one wanted more of the active, personal voice. But his seriousness of ambition, intent and skill in writing mark this out as one of the most inspiring books of recent times.

If Ken Wilson is right, and we are at a crossroads in our sport, let's learn to trust the 'difficult' writer or visionary artist to help us apprehend 'The Seen Climb, the Known Climb, the Dram Climb', and find new meanings in climbing: for as Drasdo points out, 'Climbing is substantially an activity of the imagination'. Not 'fashion' or 'fancy', note, but 'imagination' - the precursor to adventure. Long may it be celebrated as such by such adventurous writers and by such visionary publishers as The Ernest Press.