A photographic hike along the trail of Robert-Louis Stevenson
Robert-Louis Stevenson, a young Scottish writer and future author of ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde’, stayed regularly in France from 1874. In 1878, he decided to visit the Cévennes region. He took the train and stopped off in Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille (Haute-Loire), a small village close to Le Puy-En-Velay where he bought a jenny from a farmer, naming her ‘Modestine’, and equiped himself for the trip.
On September 22nd, he left Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille with Modestine. Twelve days and 220 kilometers later, after numerous adventures, he reached Saint-Jean-du-Gard where he sold Modestine and headed to Alès by stagecoach. He brought back in his suitcase seventy full-pages of notes, his ‘Travel Diary’ which would be published one year later as: ‘Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes’.
Nowadays, the trail led by R-L.Stevenson has been marked out a as a major hiking trail, the ‘GR 70’ that begins in Velay, Gevaudan and Mont Lozère and ends in the Cévennes.
As an amateur of travel litterature, a regular hiker and a large format landscape photograper, I hiked the ‘GR 70’ with a donkey, ‘Sherpa’, and a 4×10 inches large format camera. I took around a undred negatives which formed a 15 photographs portfolio of the landscapes and the atmospheres encountered along the trail.
4×10 inches negatives are contact printed on ‘Lodima Fine Art’ silver chloride paper.
