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 man 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?

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?

(Keep it clean, people.)

*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.