Sharing a funicular with Queen Victoria isn’t an everyday occurrence – or particularly comfortable, squeezed up against a lot of lady in a lot of frock. And the attendant presence in the same compartment of a cardinal in scarlet (down to socks and slippers), an alleged King of Bohemia (a dodgy title if ever there was one), and a person in a deerstalker who bears a strong resemblance to the world’s greatest detective is sufficiently surreal to leave you wondering if you overdid the schnapps the night before.

But this was not drink- or drug- or altitude-induced delirium: just the members of the Sherlock Holmes Society doing what they do in Switzerland – which is to go up mountains dressed to kill (as you might say), impersonating characters out of their favourite stories.

Queen Victoria, swathed in bombazine and balancing on her head a small crown that looked as though it once adorned a statue of the Virgin Mary, was in fact a London lawyer. So was the red cardinal. And so was the alleged King of Bohemia. In fact, every second member of the Sherlock Holmes Society seemed to be a lawyer. Draw your own conclusions.

I was once a lawyer (briefly), as it happens, but against the grain I’ve never been a fan of Sherlock Holmes; and when the chance came up to join these members of the Holmes Soc on their so-called “pilgrimage” to Switzerland – some 70 of them, all in costume, all as mad as hatters in a genial and no doubt harmless way – I’d scarcely read a word of Conan Doyle.

But having done my homework in the previous days, I knew only too well where we were heading with the queen, the cardinal et al on the funicular. We were about to re-enact the Dreadful Circumstances of the Death of Sherlock Holmes, engaged in mortal battle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, at the Reichenbach Falls (cue portentous music on an out-of-tune piano, offstage screams etc, and the sound of rushing water).

For the sake of anyone who doesn’t know, I should explain that after years of churning out Holmes mysteries on an industrial scale, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew tired of his own creation and decided to kill him off. The mise-en-scène for this departure was an actual place in Switzerland, which Doyle had visited: a small, neat town called Meiringen, midway between Lucerne and Interlaken. And the site of the encounter with Moriarty — the “Napoleon of Crime”, although you’re never told exactly what he’s done — was an actual path beside the said falls, which are written up by Conan Doyle in suitably dramatic terms as “that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam”, although they don’t swirl quite so dreadfully these days thanks to a nearby hydroelectric power plant that saps their energy.

It’s here that Holmes and Moriarty meet, struggle and drop the 90 or so metres down into the cauldron, never to be seen again. And, accordingly, the Reichenbach Falls have become a place of pilgrimage for Sherlockians the world over.

Most of them, unlike the ones I joined, don’t dress up and re-enact the fateful plunge (which, I should add, was done with dummies that the Holmes Society keeps to hand; it saves on medical expenses). But they none the less go up on the funicular to stare down, and to see the plaque and other memorabilia in a little cabin at the top. And having done so, they can walk back into Meiringen to see the hotel where Holmes spent his last night (another plaque), together with a nearby Sherlock Holmes statue (done by the same sculptor who did the one outside Baker Street station), and a Sherlock Holmes Museum with a mock-up of the sitting-room of 221B Baker Street — complete with Holmes’s Stradivari violin (bought second-hand for 45 shillings: art came cheaper then), and the Persian slipper in which he keeps his tobacco.

Among the less fanciful but more ironic items in the museum is a newspaper cutting from 1910 which reveals that Sherlock Holmes novels were once banned from station bookstalls in this part of the world because of their supposedly bad effect on Swiss youth. But it’s a markedly different story today, when the Bernese Oberland can’t do enough to encourage Sherlockian tourism — with official visits like that of the UK Holmes Society playing a major part.

For the entire week that the queen, the cardinal and their assorted entourage were in residence (distributing printed business cards that helpfully explained who they were), they were welcomed by civic dignitaries, accompanied by lederhosen-clad bands, and spent a lot of time processing through the streets — waving to passers-by and patting children on the head in a Victorian manner that predated CRB checks.

They processed through Interlaken. They processed through Grindelwald (which doesn’t have so much to do with Sherlock Holmes, but details aren’t important when you’re having fun). They also piled into the little trains that take you up and up, getting progressively more little, to the Jungfraujoch – the highest spot in Europe you can reach without crampons – which now boasts an ice sculpture of Sherlock Holmes alongside all the other Disneyesque attractions that the Swiss have dug into the mountaintop in case the views don’t satisfy.

In fact, the sight of 70 Victorian gentlefolk wasn’t the strangest prospect on the Jungfraujoch that day. Far stranger was the fact that almost everybody else was Indian or Pakistani, lured there by the thousands because Bollywood romances tend to culminate in dance routines filmed in or around the Jungfrau. Thoughtfully, the summit of the joch now has a curry restaurant to accommodate this clientele. Bizarre but true.

Another minor irony of the Sherlockians in Switzerland was that wherever they processed, it was the queen and cardinal (not Holmes and Watson) who attracted most attention, even though their presence in the stories is peripheral. But that’s the consequence of having the best frocks.

And one last irony is that, as every Conan Doyle fan knows, Holmes’s appalling death proved temporary. Under pressure from his readers, Conan Doyle later revived him, and he lived on for another quarter-century. But that just gave the Sherlock Holmes Society another opportunity for playing what they call the “great game”.

Coming down from the funicular, they solemnly remembered Holmes to mournful music from the town band; shared a lamentation meal; and then, with Christ-like grace, a few bars of the Hallelujah Chorus, and a lot of photographs, he was resurrected. Until next time around.

“I’m worried,” Queen Victoria told me, “that when I get back to work next Monday, someone will have put this on my screensaver. They think I’m barmy as it is.”

And now, conclusive proof.

Read more: UK sites associated with Sherlock Holmes

Essential reading

“The Final Problem” in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Penguin, £6.99).

On television

The first episode of series three of Sherlock will be broadcast on BBC One on New Year’s Day.

Getting there

Meiringen is best-reached by train from Zurich Airport which is served with direct flights from the UK by British Airways (ba.com), EasyJet (easyjet.com) and Swiss (swiss.com).

From Zurich it’s a three-and-a-half hour rail journey (sbb.ch), changing at Lucerne, that runs through some of the loveliest scenery in Switzerland, so don’t plan to sleep.

Trains to the Jungfraujoch run from Meiringen via Interlaken Ost, with the option to pass through Grindelwald en route. The historic Jungfraubahn is leisurely (about two and a half hours each way from Interlaken) but stunning as you run along the north wall of the Eiger. It’s also stunningly expensive, and a bit of a zoo when you reach the top (along with 5,000 other visitors per day packing the restaurants and tourist shops) but worth doing once (jungfrau.ch).

Where to stay

Meiringen itself is small with a limited range of hotels, some of them surprisingly poor: choose with care. The most substantial, patronised by Holmes in fiction and by Conan Doyle in real life, is the Parkhotel du Sauvage (sauvage.ch): shabby-grand, with just enough of its Victorian past intact to feel the part. Double room from about £120.

As well as visiting the falls, also worth doing is the world’s steepest funicular at Gelmer, close to Meiringen, but only if you like fairground rides: it’s scary — but with a fabulously impressive glacial lake at the top that almost makes you forget you have to get back on the funicular to go down (haslital.ch).

The Sherlock Holmes Society

The Society has been travelling intermittently to Switzerland since 1968, though the next trip is to Dartmoor. A decent costume and a sense of humour are essential, especially when trying to get through airport security in the crown jewels (sherlock-holmes.org.uk).

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