Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

I behold The House,         the Brotherhood austere                               And what am I,                 that I am here?

Robert Louis Stevenson – Travels in the Cevennes with a Donkey

Midway through the afternoon I bumped into Hay. The weird thing was, I had sort of been thinking about her a few minutes before she appeared in front of my eyes. Maybe Charles de Foucauld was in action!

Ok, I admit I hadn’t been thinking specifically about Hay but I had been thinking about my 1982 GAP year in Australia a few minutes before I bumped into Hay.

In 1981/2 my father reluctantly agreed to buy me a return air ticket to Australia. The deal was simple. I would fly off to Australia for six months, get a job, earn enough money to travel around the country meeting distant relatives and return, in due course, to begin my studies in Modern History at Oxford University. What could be simpler?

The answer, as it turned out, was quite a lot. The air ticket that my father had purchased from a bucket shop in Trafalgar Square from a Mr Aziz involved a one month stopover in Singapore and was on the Indonesian carrier, Air Garuda, one of whose planes had crashed into the Indian Ocean a few months earlier with all lives lost. It was perhaps for this reason that Mr Aziz’s bucket shop return flight ticket to Oz was so cheap!

I had a great time in Australia travelling around the country from Brisbane to the Barrier Reef and then working my way to Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Tasmania before arriving back in Brisbane via Alice Springs, Townsville and Mount Isa. Australia and the Aussies were fantastic. And it all happened during the Falklands War in 1982.

I was dwelling on all these memories when Hay appeared. She was an Australian from Melbourne and walking the Stevenson Way. The heat was doing her down, she didn’t speak much French and I sensed she was feeling a bit depressed. I suggested she head for the Abbey of Notre Dame des Neiges and then follow the Chemin de Régordane to Nîmes, where she had friends. She’d decided to walk the Stevenson Way because she thought it might be quite isolated. Little did she know!

In 1878, the Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson, decided to set off on a walk through the Cevennes. He hired a donkey called Modestine, walked some 200 miles with a tent and backpack, stayed a night at the Abbey of Notre Dame des Neiges and went home to write a book about his travels called ‘ A Walk in the Cevennes with a Donkey’.

In the process he became the first person to advertise the benefits of independent long distance walking in Europe. Today, the Stevenson Way, which retraces his 1878 walk, is one of the most popular in France.

I followed the Stevenson Way from the Abbey of Notre Dame des Neiges to Langogne. In the process I must have passed over 200 hikers walking in the opposite direction as well as a couple of donkeys faithfully retracing the steps of Modestine!

My night at the Abbey of Notre Dame-des-Neiges was superb. I shared a three course evening meal at the Abbey with an entertaining group of French hikers, one of whom had walked the Coast to Coast Path and Offa’s Dyke Path in the UK. It was great to break bread and chat away in French with kindred spirits.

When I eventually reached Langogne shortly before 5pm after nearly ten hours of walking, the sign on the town pharmacy indicated that the temperature was 36C! But weirdly the day’s walking had been gentle, the views had been far reaching and I could quite understand why I had passed something in the region of 200 sixty-seventy year old retirees walking the Stevenson Way.

As for Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels, without doubt Kidnapped was my favourite, televised in the 1970s with David McCallum ( he of Colditz) starring as Alan Breck.

Australia, the South of France and Scotland. You never quite know what each day will bring, walking across France!