The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Host’s stories stirred sick RLS
Contributions on this page concerning the short-lived exploits of a literary legend during a Highland Perthshire sojourn in the later years of Queen Victoria’s reign continue to fascinate.
Author and authority on Scottish social history Donald Paton is the latest reader to get in touch on the subject, and he provides a few illuminating observations on the visit to the old Atholl district that was made by the novelist frequently referred to as “RLS” some 143 years past.
Kinnaird Cottage as it was a century ago.
Mr Paton, who is best known for his 2005 book Twixt Castle and Mart, which focuses on Perth’s Needless Road, and the lockdownproduced tome Nae Place Mair Braw, a social history of the Fair City’s Craigie and Cherrybank districts, writes: “Regarding the recent mentions in the Craigie column about Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1881 stay near Pitlochry, I thought that the attached 1928 photograph of Kinnaird Cottage, where Stevenson stayed, might be of interest to readers as the house probably would have looked much like this during his visit.”
The wordsmith and former DC Thomson advertising department worker continues: “It is recorded that the weather in the area during the opening stages of Stevenson’s holiday was absolutely dreadful with rain and wind sweeping around the house for several days.
“Louis, who was not in the best health, could not venture outside and in the afternoons whilst seated beside a warm fire he would ask Mrs Sim, the owner of the house, to tell him some of her old stories. Thus it came about that he started on Thrawn Janet, The Merry Men and The Body-snatcher. Later that year, while living at Braemar, he wrote much of Treasure Island.”
Mr Paton concludes: “Today a bronze plaque on the wall of the house at Kinnaird, beyond Moulin on the A924, informs passers-by that ‘Robert Louis Stevenson lived in this house from the 7 th of June to the 2nd of August, 1881.’”