LONG lizards scurry up moss-covered craggy rocks and walls, while the deafening courtship calls of cicadas reverberate across the peaks of the Cévennes mountains. This region, a 90-minute drive from Montpellier and Nîmes, lies to the north of the French Mediterranean lowland and although busy with tourists in the summer is under-visited the rest of the year. The delightfully unspoilt landscape of small medieval villages clinging to the steep slopes became known to the young writer Robert Louis Stevenson when he made his celebrated trip with a donkey through the area in autumn 1878. He kept detailed notes of his solo ramble which inspired his classic work Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes. His donkey, called Modestine, carried food, tools, a lamp and candle, a gun and a bottle of Beaujolais. He wrote that it had ‘”a kindly eye, a determined under-jaw and a sober daintiness of gait”. One hundred and forty years on, the area through which Stevenson travelled for 12 days remains a brooding landscape and has entered part of French folklore. Redolent of an older France, the Cévennes is a mix of steep cliffs, extensive forests, shale, granite and open plateaux. The writer is now immortalised in the RLS Trail which has become a well-known 140-mile route across the hills and valleys of rural France. It runs from Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille to St-Jean-du Gard and is one of the most historic long-distance trails with 6,000 hikers each year. Look around and it is not hard to see… [Read full story]
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