travels with my donkey robert louis stevenson

To make things more difficult (every adventurer seeks to make things more difficult) he accompanied himself with a bad-tempered donkey called Modestine that he didn't know how to control. And wrote one of the very earliest long-distance walk stories, great-grandfather to ten thousand blogs of today.įor twelve days he walked, musing on wolves and religious history, through a 'tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of fir-wood and white roads wandering through the hills'. It was in August 1878, during one of his intervals of only mild ill-health, that RLS set out on an actual backpack trip, through the forests and quiet limestone hills of central France. Much in 'Travels with a Donkey' is familiar to long-distance walkers of today.

With its overland journey from Mull to Edinburgh, the cave on Ben Alder, the troublesome crossing of Rannoch Moor, the hike out through the Braes of Balquidder, it ought in itself to count as hillwalking literature – apart from the awkward fact of being written by a non-hillwalker. 'Kidnapped', considered for a century or so as a book for boys, is in the current millennium taking its place among the top Scottish novels. From childhood onwards he was permanently unwell, with what was diagnosed at the time as tuberculosis.Īnd so he became an adventurer in spirit only, and in the world of the imagination. Born into a family of famous lighthouse engineers, RLS had the leisure, and the temperament, to become an outdoor adventurer.

Robert Louis Stevenson was the greatest Scottish hillwalker to never walk up any hills.

Travels with my donkey robert louis stevenson