In 1879 Robert Louis Stevenson published his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, which recounts a journey that proved a watershed in the writers’ life.

Not yet famous, frail of health, at loggerheads with his family (generations of lighthouse builders) and in love with a married woman, Stevenson decided to go on a solitary journey in the wilds of France. Solitary except for Modestine, his donkey.

He travelled 190 kilometres in 12 days, sleeping out under the stars in a sleeping bag lined with blue sheepskin. His baggage included a stove, a lantern, candles, a knife, a pistol and a flask. His stock of food consisted of a leg of mutton, sausages, chocolate, a bottle of Beaujolais and some cognac.“Do not say of me,” he was to write to his father, “that I’ve turned away from the works of my fathers and have fled from the sea, the towers that we’ve built and the lamps we have lit to shut myself in a room and play cards like a child.” Time would prove him right. Not only because of the success that would come with Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but also because this dreamer’s journey was, paradoxically, to change that territory and its reality in a very concrete manner.A hundred years on, Stevenson’s travels with a donkey were rediscovered: first they were re-travelled by Carolyn Bennett Patterson for National Geographic, then they became a target for many hikers. At this stage the local population began to see their territory as they’d never seen it before and broke out of their traditional isolation by reviving the local economy through sustainable tourism. In 1993 the route was marked as the “Chemin de Stevenson” and growing numbers of hikers made for good business: not only catering and accommodation but also the rearing and hiring of donkeys and artisan production of packsaddles for them …It would seem that les Cévennes have now become the world centre for donkey trekking, a means of transport that’s gaining new followers everyday!To find out more: www.chemin-stevenson.org