Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

His journey was designed to provide material for publication while allowing him to distance himself from a love affair with an American woman of which his friends and family did not approve and who had returned to her husband in California.

Travels recounts Stevenson's 12-day, 200-kilometre (120 mi) solo hiking journey through the sparsely populated and impoverished areas of the Cévennes mountains in south-central France in 1878.

The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

The book appeared the following year, 1879, and is dedicated to his friend Sidney Colvin, an art historian and critic who had befriended him when he was unpublished and seeking to develop a career as a writer.

Asked in 2007 why this "Ecossais veritable" continues to have such an impact on the identity of the people of the Cévennes today, a local politician and historian at St Germain de Calberte told the Scottish writer Alastair McIntosh, "Because he showed us the landscape that makes us who we are.