The long grass is home to poisonous snakes, huge wild boar and even wolves. It is an arduous, unlikely journey for a 59-yearold woman with severe arthritis.

Now that her body has been found, her family still has two questions. How did she get to where she was? And why was she up there?

Last Thursday, the results from the post-mortem in Medjugorje were greeted with dismay by Brady's two sisters in Ireland.

The Bosnian coroner ruled out foul play and said that it may never be possible to determine exactly what killed the motherof-five. "It's not the answer we were looking for, " Dolores Flynn, one of Brady's sisters, told the Sunday Tribune. "We would like a second post mortem to be carried out on her body when she gets home. I don't know if that will be possible, now that her death certificate has been signed, but that is what we would like. We want to know how she died, why she went all that way, and how she even got up there in the first place. Also we just cannot understand why the police dogs didn't find her. There were 600 people searching with dogs and helicopters. How did they not find her?"

On Friday morning in Medjugorje, Brady's husband, Stephen, is musing over the same question. Sitting down to an Irish breakfast with his brother-inlaw, Philip Shevlin, Brady shakes his head in disbelief at the location where his wife was found. "I mean, one of the reasons we didn't find her is probably because we thought she could never have gone that far, " he says. "We told the police to focus on the town and the area close by. Because of the arthritis in her knee, we never thought to focus the search on where she was found. But even if we had passed her, we could have missed her like that."

He snaps his fingers to emphasise his point, before picking up a stack of freshly developed photographs, taken by the police at the scene where Winnie Brady's body was found. "Just look at that vegetation and now imagine it in the summer, " he says, indicating one of the pictures.

The photograph shows a circle of sharp rocks, surrounded by long reedy grass that has been flattened by police officers and the forensic team. A solitary blue forensic glove is lying on the rocks. Three bushes encircle the area, all brown and dead - for now. There are other pictures of the view from where Winnie Brady finally lay down and died.

Looking at what she would have seen, there is a dizzying sense of isolation. Behind her was the top of the mountain, promising nothing but further danger. In front, the nearest house and road seems to be about one-and-ahalf kilometres away and the stretch of rugged ground in between suggests a daunting difficult journey. Especially if Brady was injured. "She could have been bitten by a snake, " says Stephen Brady. "She took a photograph of her foot when she was up there and it was all swollen and sore-looking. And the man who found her told us that the snakes are very bad up there in the summer. Most people don't wear the right shoes.

Winnie was just wearing sandals." But Brady says there was no mention of venom poisoning in the coroner's report. "Her body was so badly decomposed when I saw it, I could understand why they couldn't really find out anything, " he says.

"Nothing they could do."

Hunter On the other side of the town, the Pansion Lola guesthouse, where Winnie Brady was staying with her friends, looks empty and desolate. The outside terrace is grey and covered in water from a recent shower. Inside, it is almost empty. Directly behind the guesthouse, in a strange coincidence, lives local man Vidan Kozina, the hunter who discovered Brady's body seven days ago.

Settling into his couch in the cosy warmth of his sitting-room, Kozina says that he was hunting boar on the mountain when his three dogs suddenly ran away into the thick undergrowth. He saw something lying on the ground. He thought it was a dead animal. "Then I realised it was a woman, " he says, speaking through his son who translates his words into English. "She did not look like she had fallen. Her head was on her hands like she had gone to sleep like that." Kozina says that he thinks it is possible that Brady had been bitten by a snake. He shrugs. "It is a very dangerous place, " he says.

"There are many snakes in the summer, and wolves and pigs.

Look at this." He reaches for a photograph of himself and his son standing over a huge wild boar, prize-winning hunting game. The animal is twice as large as the man. "Two hundred kilograms, " says Kozina proudly.

"Big pigs. It is dangerous up there." The hunter could offer no reason as to why Winnie Brady may have decided to walk to where she did, because, he says, there is nothing on that side of the mountain. "It is eight or nine kilometres from here, " he says, shrugging again when told that newspaper reports had been saying it is just three kilometres from the town centre. "Not three, " he says. "At least eight.

People don't know how far they are going. In the last 10 years, six people are missing. Four from Austria, one Croat and the Irish woman. The Croat went missing at the same time as the Irish woman and has not been found yet. The other four have all been found in the same part of the mountain. They didn't know.

They got lost."

Outside, it has started to rain again. The Pansion Lola guesthouse stands deserted. It was here that Winnie Brady was last seen, on 6 September at around 1pm. There has been one unconfirmed sighting of a disorientated-looking woman matching Brady's description in the same area at 4.30pm. After that, nothing but the clues that Brady left herself, through the use of a disposable camera that was found alongside her body. The first of those developed pictures show the Dublin woman with her pilgrimage group at the Pansion Lola. The next is a view from Apparition Hill. Locals suggest it was taken from high up, well off the normal tourist path. The deep shadow on the hill suggests it was taken in the early morning, leading to speculation that Brady had spent the previous night out in the open. The next photograph is very similar to those taken by the police, a view from where Brady's body was found, the light indicating that the photo was taken in the middle of the day.

And the last two photographs, the final record of Winnie Brady's life, show simply her left foot and ankle which are badly swollen.

The pictures are taken from a sitting position, facing down towards the house and the road just one-and-a-half kilometres away.

A taxi ride from the Pansion Lola guesthouse to that road at the foot of the mountain certainly seems to cover a longer distance than three kilometres.

From the car, the location of Winnie's death is even more baffling. So far away, so difficult to get to. So why?

In Ireland, her sisters continue to search for answers. They ask about the row that Winnie had before she died. About the fact that she was moved into a room on her own, the day before her death. About why she wasn't found sooner.

The taxi-driver stares up the mountainside then shakes his head. "Don't go there, " he says.

"It's bad, dangerous." Almost everyone wouldn't walk the path where Winnie Brady died.