BARD IN THE WOODS

SCOTTISH author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is most well known for his novels Kidnapped and Treasure Island but he was also a keen outdoorsman and his 1878 memoir Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes recounts his 12-day, 200km solo hike through the sparsely populated and impoverished areas of the Cévennes mountains in south-central France. The book’s other principal character is Modestine, a stubborn, manipulative donkey Stevenson could never quite master. It is one of the earliest accounts to present hiking and camping as a recreational activity. Two years earlier, in 1876, Stevenson wrote an essay on the pleasures of hiking, filled with humour and interesting observations.

“It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us