Scottish Storytrails

Scotland's landscape was, and is, unquestionably distinct, as are the renowned writers it has produced. Tobias Smollett was the first Scottish writer to rhapsodise about the beauties of his native land in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, when his native country was increasingly referred to as North Britain after the Treaty of Union with England in 1707. Sir Walter Scott took up the pen to make the Highlands and Borders world-famous through Rob Roy and many of his other works. The action of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped famously ranges through the Highlands before returning to Edinburgh and the hero of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay, roams around Galloway and the Borders as he desperately tries to escape his pursuers. Edinburgh's Old Town is cleverly evoked in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by Scott's friend James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, while in more recent times Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Ian...