Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Pentland Hills
For Hillend, 6 miles south of the centre, take bus #4 or #15 westbound from Princes St; to get to Swanston, 5 miles south of the centre,
take bus #16 westbound from Princes St or #27 southbound from The Mound to Oxgangs Rd, from where you can walk along Swanston Rd
he
Pentland Hills
, a chain some eighteen miles long and five wide, dominate most
views south of Edinburgh and offer walkers and mountain bikers a thrilling taste of
wild Scottish countryside just beyond the suburbs.
he simplest way to get a taste of the scenery of the Pentlands is to set off from the
car park by the ski centre at
Hillend
, at the northeast end of the range; take the path up
the right-hand side of the dry ski slopes, turning left shortly after crossing a stile to
reach a prominent point with outstanding views over Edinburgh and Fife. If you're
feeling energetic, go higher up where the vistas get even better. An alternative entry
point to the Pentland Hills is
Swanston
, a short distance northwest of Hillend. It's an
unspoiled, highly exclusive hamlet of whitewashed thatched-roof dwellings separated
from the rest of the city by almost a mile of farmland;
Robert Louis Stevenson
(see box,
below) spent his boyhood summers in Swanston Cottage, the largest of the houses,
immortalizing it in the novel
St Ives
.
1
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Though
Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894) is sometimes dismissed for his straight-up
writing style, he was one of the best-loved writers of his generation, and one whose novels,
short stories, travelogues and essays remain enormously popular over a century after his death.
Born in Edinburgh into a distinguished family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson was a
sickly child, with a solitary childhood dominated by his governess, Alison “Cummie”
Cunningham, who regaled him with tales drawn from Calvinist folklore. Sent to the university
to study engineering, Stevenson rebelled against his upbringing by spending much of his time
in the low-life howffs and brothels of the city. He later switched his studies to law, and
although called to the bar in 1875, by then he had decided to channel his energies into
literature: while still a student, he had already made his mark as an
essayist
, and eventually
had more than a hundred essays published, ranging from light-hearted whimsy to trenchant
political analysis.
Stevenson's other early successes included the
travelogue
Travels with a Donkey in the
Cevennes
, kaleidoscopic jottings based on his journeys in France, where he went to escape
Scotland's weather, which was damaging his health. It was there that he met Fanny Osbourne,
an American ten years his senior, who was estranged from her husband and had two children
in tow. His voyage to join her in San Francisco formed the basis for his most important factual
work,
The Amateur Emigrant
, a vivid first-hand account of the great nineteenth-century
European migration to the United States. Having married the now-divorced Fanny, Stevenson
began an elusive search for an agreeable climate that led to Switzerland, the French Riviera
and the Scottish Highlands.
He belatedly turned to the novel, achieving immediate acclaim in 1881 for
Treasure Island
,
a moralistic adventure yarn that began as an entertainment for his stepson and future
collaborator, Lloyd Osbourne. In 1886 his most famous short story,
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde
(despite its nominal London setting) offered a vivid evocation of Edinburgh's
Old Town: an allegory of its dual personality of prosperity and squalor, and an analysis of its
Calvinistic preoccupations with guilt and damnation. The same year saw the publication of the
historical romance
Kidnapped
, an adventure novel which exemplified Stevenson's view that
literature should seek above all to entertain.
In 1887 Stevenson left Britain for good, travelling first to the United States where he began
one of his most ambitious novels,
The Master of Ballantrae
. A year later, he set sail for the South
Seas, and eventually settled in
Samoa
; his last works include a number of stories with a local
setting, such as the grimly realistic
The Ebb Tide
and
The Beach of Falesà
. However, Scotland
continued to be his main inspiration: he wrote
Catriona
as a sequel to
Kidnapped
, and was at
work on two more novels with Scottish settings,
St Ives
and
Weir of Hermiston
, a dark story of
father and son confrontation, at the time of his sudden death from a brain haemorrhage in
1894. He was buried on the top of Mount Vaea overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
