Trevor and his daughter have asked a very interesting question that I should have addressed earlier: how did Stevenson, sitting all the way down in Bournemouth at Skerryvore, write about the Highlands & Islands with any accuracy?

Well, he did spend some of his childhood up here. His dad and his uncle were both master lighthouse builders and spent some time on Earraid constructing one of the many Stevenson lighthouses dotted all over the region.

So as a kid, Robert Louis would have had license to roam the hills and get to know the place quite well. And he would almost certainly have walked much of the way back to Edinburgh occasionally, accompanying his dad or his uncle on business.

The trick of it, though, is that RL was a sickly kid. And not much better as a grown-up. He was living and working in Bournemouth precisely because it was meant to be good for his health. He couldn’t hack it up North. He was a David then, not an Alan. But that didn’t stop him dreaming, imagining, making up for his own perceived failings

So interesting – isn’t it? – that he writes so much about big tough outsiders like Alan Breck, John Silver, Mr Hyde. And he always pairs them with potentially vulnerable innocents abroad: David Balfour, Jim Hawkins, Dr Jekyll.

It must have been hard to come to terms with being a slight TB-stricken aesthete growing up in a family full of rough tough engineers. Not that there’s any evidence that his dad held it against him in any way. (Dad’s aren’t like that, are they Trevor?)

But there is something in this story about what kind of man a boy is meant to become. I still wrestle with this. Oh to be a bit more like Alan Breck and a little less like David Balfour.

As I walk through the beautiful Morvern countryside I have time to think about what a boy’s adventure story like ‘Kidnapped’ has to say to a 21st-century man like me.

*Please note all the Kidnapped posts have been transferred here from the original blog at https://timwright.typepad.com/kidmapper which no longer exists.

I have archived the comments from the original site but have not included them here. If you have any queries about this project, do get in touch.