Stevenson's account of his extended walk, in 1878, through uplands and mountains in south-western France amply fulfils this declaration of intent. Stevenson writes with a characteristic wry humour on his own failings as a traveller (who else would admit to hiking with an egg-whisk?), on his travails with Modestine the self-willed donkey (animal-lovers should brace themselves for nineteenth-century attitudes to beasts of burden) and on the discomforts of travel in the age before mass tourism; and with, perhaps, a certain youthful (he was 24) condescension in his observations of peasant life on the cusp of modernity.