Where I Walked in September 2025, and with Whom – The great affair is to move

I walked about a third of the Chemin de Stevenson in southern France, accompanied by eight other intrepid Mainers and three jolly donkeys.  Here we are, on the last of our six days, leaving the summit of Mont Lozère, the highest point we reached.

Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose.  For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.  (“Cheylard and Luc”)

This is Robert Louis Stevenson writing in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879).  I have now been to Luc and Cheylard.  Many people go to Luc and Cheylard.  Why?  Because Stevenson went there and put them in his book.  Ironic!  Although this is in the preceding paragraph, about the route from Cheylard to Luc:

It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life.

We followed Stevenson’s path but through a delightful fairy-like forest full of mushrooms and mushroom pickers gathering the mushrooms we had eaten the night before in Cheylard (with pasta) and would eat that night in Luc (in a tarte).  It is hard to imagine the landscape Stevenson saw, the forest eradicated by centuries of woodcutting.  It is much nicer now.

Young Stevenson thought his third book would concentrate more on the history of the region, especially the small-scale but brutal religious war of the early 18th century.  He designed and commissioned a gigantic sleeping bag that was so heavy he had to buy a donkey (Modestine) to carry it and the rest of his gear.  A good writer, he quickly realized that his struggle with the donkey was most interesting thing that happened, and the book shifted.  It’s a good book.

The French embraced the book – the French, in general, embrace books – and eventually developed the trail for hikers.  Farms rent donkeys to people who want them.  Hotels and villages and abbeys have paddocks and hay. Walking this trail with a donkey or two is an ordinary French tourist activity.  A recent movie set on the Chemin de Stevenson, Antoinette dans les Cévennes (2020), has perhaps made the hike more “fashionable,” as Emma told us, but everyone already knew what it was.  Everyone in France I mean; we talked to a young Scottish couple said they had trouble, despite Stevenson’s fame, finding anyone in Scotland who knew the trail existed.

Our trainer.  An hour or two of instructions, mush of it about packing the panniers, and off we go.  We were the only people on our part of the trail with donkeys.  They do complicate the hike.  I wonder what it is like in August.  More hikers, more donkeys, more flies.

Donkeys, or at least ours, are fine companions and a source of great pleasure, except for the occasions when they are not.  They now carry a lot less weight (that is why we had three of them) and are better treated in every way than poor Modestine.

What else.  The Abbey de Notre Dame des Neiges, Our Lady of the Snows, was a monastery when Stevenson visited, but is now run by nuns who have embraced the mission of housing and feeding hikers.  Here we see Flocond (Snowflake), their socil media star, and the bicycle of the nun who manages the hostel.  The donkeys are in a paddock just to the left, their snouts plunged into an immense pile of hay.  Now I am just putting up vacation snaps.