Monday, September 06, 2010

Kidnapped on Erraid!




The Scottish island where I took a working holiday (check out my t'other blog) was well known to Robert Louis Stevenson who spent his summers there, as his father was an engineer working on the nearby lighthouse. (The window pic is the living room in one of the lighthouse workers' cottages, where I stayed with two friends.) Stevenson used Erraid as one of the settings for his book, Kidnapped, a great adventure story not unlike Dickens. Stevenson is most famous, of course, for Treasure Island. There's a story told on the island that Stevenson's father wanted him to be an engineer but Robert had other dreams and he lay down on the Wishing Stone on Erraid - will post a pic of it soon - and made his wish to be a writer. Now I have to be honest and admit that I didn't know Stevenson was Scottish. Oh, and here's a pic of Balfour Bay, named after the main character in Kidnapped, which has a fabulous strand and is lovely to swim in, though freezing cold.

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