'Kidnapped' is a fantastically exciting book. The story of David Balfour running for his life across the Highlands, sometimes accompanied by tough and rebellious Alan, sometimes pursued by the English army, seemed so visceral and exciting to me that I wanted to try it for myself.
So that is exactly what I am doing.
From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’.
From this blog you'll be able to read and discuss the book itself, listen to extracts being read out in the places the book describes and keep in touch about where I am each day.
Perhaps there's something you'd like me to do or think about whilst I'm walking. Perhaps you'd like me to visit specific sites and film them for you. Or better still, perhaps you'd like to come out here and join me for a walk, add your own responses to being on the Kidnapped Trail and have an adventure of your very own.
As mentioned on the Kidmapped blog, several opportunities have arisen out of trudging across the Highlands. One is the idea of developing Kidmapped as a format for a series of crossplatform documentaries about several different books, each of them mappable and walkable in their own way. Here’s a sample of some the maps I’ve dug up so far:
A slightly more space-age idea was indicated by Jo Flintham’s fab mashup of my trip (see how proactive and smart followers and friends can be?), suggesting, as it does, a mobile app that could provide location-specific material for anyone interested in undertaking a literary walk.
Better still would be if you could geotag your own tweets, pics, blog posts etc and use them to create a print-your-own booklet – so anyone can then become a Kidmapper if armed with the basic kit of a mobile, a camera and a map/book:
I’m already experimenting with ways of taking the digital content generated on my walk and placing it automatically into templated pages; thus – hey presto – you should be able generate your own personalised booklet or bind-in:
And finally I’m already thinking how I might return to the Kidnapped Trail next year with something bigger and better. I still dream of gathering a merry band of travellers and, every day, organising relevant games, talks and conferences along the way in pubs and local village halls and even out in the open air (weather permitting). It would be like an extended itinerant arts festival & conference that anyone could join either online or out in the wild - sponsored, of course, by Famous Grouse ;-)
It’s unlikely I’ll have the time or the opportunity to play around in all these areas at once. (I do have a home to go to and children to feed, no, honestly). So a choice has to be made.
For 2010 should it be Kidmapped again or all-round Bookmapping? What do you think? If you’re coming to Playful, do please help me make up my mind.
‘What happens next?’ asks Nick. It’s a good question.
Sitting here in my comfortable southern abode, it’s already obvious that this is not the last of the Kidmapper.
Sitting in South Queensferry is a provocation: a bottle of whisky sent to me by Famous Grouse’s PR company congratulating me on completion of the Kidnapped Trail! (Thank you @deluca1985!)
If this first primitive foray into literary blogumentary can glean such riches, who knows what could be achieved next year. A whole case!? Perhaps I should consider a similar treatment of Whisky Galore.
The list is growing of books that might benefit from the kidnapper treatment.(bookmapping? booksteps? litwalks?) Sticking with Stevenson, Richard has suggested An Inland Voyage, although this would require the use of canoes, not something I feel confident about.
Lesley opts for The Amateur Emigrant and the idea of plotting Stevenons’s American peregrinations.
California does interest me, not least because it leads me to Steinbeck country and he does seem like another writer who was keen to map out the landscape across which his characters travel. Some of the work involved in mapping out The Grapes of Wrath, for example, has already been done for me. Check this out: http://www.infinitethinking.org/2007/03/great-mashup-mapping-literary-journeys.html
I’ve written already about my ambitions for extending what I’ve done so that we could make the experience of walking all or part of the Kidnapped Trail into something that could be fun, enriching and thought-provoking for one and all.
James has had some good thoughts on this score. I particularly like his reference to http://yellowarrow.net/v3/ and how that kind of idea could be applied to Kidmapped.
Thanks for your insights, James.
In short, there is no end and there are many things that could happen next. Indeed the hard work starts here, using this year’s journey and blog to work towards something more valuable & useful, more mobile & personal & context-sensitive, for other people who want to takes great books for walks; oh, and also to plot a bigger, better, weirder, richer, funnier Kidnapped Trail that more and more people could come and take part in next year. Stay tuned!
We are meant to be searching for Mr Rankeillor's house in South Queensferry, but instead we've settle for a jar at the Hawes Inn, sitting outside and watching the sun go down over the Forth.
I've made it! All the way from Earraid to South Queensferry, tracking pretty much exactly the locations and the dates as set down in the book. That one sentence has so much to answer for:
"The brig was lost on June the 27th," says he, looking in his book, "and we are now at August the 24th."
Why did Stevenson feel the need to write that? Why be so specific about dates when he didn't need to be?
I sense it might be because Stevenson really did walk that trail, day by day, in his head, dreaming of his childhood and the wild untamed Highlands whilst eking out a seemingly dull, sickly existence in 'civilised' Bournemouth. You see? This book is not just for and about the Scottish. It suits the imagination of softy Southerners too!
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed taking this book out into the wilds with me and plotting it out. As Jo has already suggested, I am hoping to develop what I've done here into some kind of mobile application that *you* can take out onto the Trail, helping others to engage with the book in the landscape it describes, and allowing you to share your own thoughts online whilst still walking out on the wilds (subject to mobile/wireless net access).
I'm also interested in publishing our own version of 'Kidnapped' as a print-based 'mashup' and great big poster-sized map of the whole trail. Also, all thoughts you have about how to create a richer, more playful and more social trail for next year, please let me know.
Who knows? Perhaps we'll bump into each other in a bothy, play blind man's buff on Mull or hide-and-seek across Rannoch Moor, start a poker night in a cave by Loch Ericht, toast Rob Roy with a dram in Strathyre or share a bowl of white pudding in Limekilns. It all goes to prove that a book can take you to amazing places where you will meet amazing people.
Ian of the Ship Inn in Limekilns has had many people come into his pub and talk a good game about 'Kidnapped', but we are the first people he's been prepared to take across the river in his boat. He even cooked us a bowl of white pudding because that's what the 'fine lass' behind the bar does in the book. (no fried egg, I'm afraid, @mossgiel).
What a fine guy Ian is! He did, though, draw the line at pretending to be a 'fine lass'; I suppose you can't have everything. But it's not a bad attempt at a creative re-playing of the book, is it Polly? I even managed to organise this *before* you commented!
The landing point at Carriden turned out to be the jetty for the Upper Forth Boat Club, and I have to say we had a fine welcome there too with a guided tour and several history lessons.
Next door to the club is a large working timberyard, and apparently Carriden used to be a much busier place than it is now, used for dropping off and picking up raw materials: timber, iron, stone, brick. Ballantine still has an active ironworks here. If you don't recognise the name, look down whilst your walking and look out for manhole covers in the street. Ballantine makes a lot of them. (thanks to Russell for this info)
It's not a great stretch to think that the Stevenson family stopped off here quite a lot to pick up building materials for all the bridges and lighthouses they were responsible for building across Scotland. There's still a strong smell of sawdust in the air - the same smell young Robert Louis might have breathed in here, maybe?
My dad and grandad were in the brushmaking business, so that smell of sawdust does it for me in terms of taking me back to my childhood, tooling around at the family workplace and play-acting adventures in my head. What smells do it for you?
Stirling to Limekilns is a tricky walk. You either stay high hugging the Ochil mountains and then dash south, or you weave your way through the Carse of Forth attempting to avoid the big towns.
Either way, it's not easy to find a path that doesn't involve walking down busy noisy roads or trudging along a very straight and boring cycle path.
Life is not made any easier by the huge number of golf courses in the area that have to be walked around rather than traversed. Perhaps this is another data set (golf course locations & dimensions) that Jo could work into his mashup.
The good news is that we did find a solution to the problem of finding a pleasant but not impossible off-road route. We dropped into the local pub. Invariably, the old guys at the bar know all about the secret paths, shortcuts and the cross-country routes that get you to the next pub.
I was up in Pembrokeshire recently and the entire Dylan Thomas Trail
seemed like a series of pub walks and was none the worse for that. You actually end up travelling bye-ways that feel ancient and almost folkloric. So not the official Kidnapped Trail, perhaps, but no doubt a route that Alan Breck might approve of.
Perhaps you'd like to share with us your favourite (or outlandish) route to a pub?
With the wind farm of Uam Var shadowing us much of the way, we followed the edges of fields, dodged across dual carriageways, found little-known footbridges and generally kept to the margins. Indeed we crept up on the Wallace Monument and Stirling Bridge without hardly anyone seeing us - just as David & Alan might have done 250 years or so earlier.
The *difference* of course is that the Wallace Monument wasn't there in their day. But my what an impressive and important structure it is! It leaves no doubt that you have stepped out of Rob Roy country and into William Wallace land (from Neeson to Gibson, eh, Brendon?).
Yet again, Stevenson has deliberately walked us into an important landscape. And in the book he chooses to get his characters there on an important date: the 23rd August - the day Wallace was 'martyred'. I suspect this mission to be in Stirling on the 23rd is what confuses Stevenson's timeline in this section of the book whereby he then 'loses' a day between here and getting to South Queensferry (Mr Rankeillor claims it's the 24th when David turns up in Chapter 27 but logically it should be the 25th.)
It's interesting to note too that Stevenson would have passed through his own adolescence watching the Memorial being built. And if that wasn't enough, it was the Stevenson family business that built the New Stirling Bridge just yards away from where David & Alan keep watch on the little old lady crossing the Old Bridge.
This isn't just a history lesson then, it's also a man looking back and re-casting and re-imagining scenes from his own childhood. This mix of the personal, the public and the political is, I think, one of the things that makes Kidnapped such a great book.
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