Robert Louis Stevenson

A love/hate relationship with his birthplace, the city of Edinburgh, haunted and inspired the writer Robert Louis Stevenson for his entire life.

   Even when he was ill and dying on the island of Samoa in 1894, he still harked back to the city he knew as a young man.

     Though he hated its climate, recalling the "missile rain", Edinburgh excited his young imagination and held him forever.     

     Today the city is a favourite place of pilgrimage for Stevenson admirers and there are many sites he knew well for them to visit.

    Robert Louis Stevenson was born in a middle class house at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh's New Town.  As the family fortunes increased, they moved ? first to Inverleith Terrace when he was three, and finally, in 1856 to an imposing residence at 17 Heriot Row, overlooking Queen Street Gardens, where his parents were to live for 30 years.

     It was in this house that the young R.L.S. endured months of illness for he always suffered from chest problems, a forewarning of the tuberculosis that plagued his adult life.

     In Heriot Row he and his beloved nurse, "Cummie", spent hours in the nursery and sickroom with her telling him macabre stories that wakened his imagination.  When he was able to go out she took him walking in Queen Street Gardens and it is said that a pond with a tiny fake island in the middle of the Gardens was his original inspiration for "Treasure Island".

     There is another candidate for his Treasure Island idea however in the island of Fidra in the Firth of Forth which can be seen from Yellowcraigs Park in North Berwick. Young Robert Louis spent a lot of time in the park while his father was constructing the Bell Rock lighthouse in the Forth estuary. Coincidentally it was another of his father's projects, Dubh Artach lighthouse on the island of Erraid off Mull, that inspired him to describe David Balfour?s going ashore in "Kidnapped".

      While convalescing from his frequent bouts of illness the boy was taken by his parents to the village of Colinton, 6 miles south of Edinburgh, where his mother?s father was the Church of Scotland minister and lived in the attractive Colinton Manse.   Colinton was an attractive and prosperous place, famed because the first bank notes produced for the Bank of Scotland were made from paper produced by the papermaking mills in the village.

     These rural visits did the sickly child so much good that his father took a lease on  nearby Swanston Cottage where the family was to spend a great deal of time and from which Robert Louis went tramping in the Pentland Hills.  Again he used happy memories of the cottage and the hills in his work, especially in ?Kidnapped?.  Swanston Cottage still stands near the Hillend ski slope and overlooking the Edinburgh by-pass.

     When he reached puberty Stevenson?s health improved and he became a reluctant student of engineering at Edinburgh University because his family wanted him to follow the footsteps of his father, uncle and grandfather, all of whom were famed as lighthouse builders.   Engineering did not interest the young man however but he compromised by studying law and spending most of his time haunting the lanes and alleys of Edinburgh?s Old Town where he absorbed the atmosphere which he put into his famous work ?Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?.