Hamish Fulton, the “walking artist” who takes only photographs and leaves only footprints

Earlier this week I did something that made absolutely no sense whatsoever – at least, when looked at from a common sense point of view. On a day when, to put it mildly, I had a fair bit on, I walked approximately 42 minutes out of my way in order to spend a further 21 minutes looking at 11 photographs of mountains with text incorporated into them – an exhibition of work by the self-styled “walking artist” Hamish Fulton at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh.These days, thanks to the wonders of the interweb, if I want to see beautiful pictures of mountains I need only fire up my Twitter feed and lo, many of the 1,001-odd people I’m currently following will have posted ravishing shots taken during recent adventures in the Alps, the Himalayas, the Rockies and elsewhere. They will usually add a few words of explanatory text alongside the images, too, mostly just descriptive, but sometimes funny or philosophical. All of which means that if I’m suddenly overcome by an urge to look at annotated pictures of mountains, I can do so at the swipe of a screen or the click of a mouse. So why go out of my way to see these 11 pictures in the flesh?