Most foreigners who travel to Korea and hear "Jirisan" think of the summit. Jirisan's highest point, Cheonwangbong, rises to 1,915 metres. Serious hikers train for it. Photographers wait for the right cloud.

But there's another way to know Jirisan. It's called the Dulle-gil — 둘레길, "the way around" — and it does not go up. It goes around. Three hundred kilometres of trail, twenty-two sections, five counties, and dozens of villages, threaded together along the mountain's lower slopes. Farmers walk parts of it to get to their fields. Grandmothers walk parts of it to visit the temple. Foreigners walk almost none of it.

This issue is our introduction — specifically, to the Namwon stretch of the loop. Sections 01 through 03 pass through Namwon; Section 22, the one that closes the loop, connects Jucheon in Namwon with Sandong in neighbouring Gurye. This is where the Dulle-gil is quietest, where the villages still cook loach soup the way they always have, and where in summer the rice paddies turn deep, wet green and the cicadas hold the afternoon still.

What follows is not a summit report. It is a village-to-village invitation. The people who live along the Dulle-gil don't rush. Neither will you.

Bring good walking shoes. Bring an appetite. Bring time — and, for July and August, a light rain shell. Namwon is not a place you visit. It is a place you enter, slowly, section by section.