This walking tour shows you Edinburgh’s New Town through the eyes of Scotland’s greatest author, Robert Louis Stevenson. We’ll take a journey back through the first 16 years of his unusual life.

We’ll turn our back on the Castle and Old Town, to explore parts of the New Town that had so recently been completed. We’ll end the tour at the house where he was born.

Your guide is one of Scotland’s legends of the stage and screen, John Shedden, and the multi-talented Vincent Guy is the voice of Stevenson reading snippets from his writing.

Stevenson eventually left Edinburgh, never to return. But he was forever inspired by his memories of home, and of his childhood.

On this tour you can look forward to hearing about:

• A number of the up-and-coming Stevenson family’s homes
• The inspiration for The Child’s Garden of Verses
• The inspiration for some of its best loved poems: The Lamplighter, Keepsake Mill and Windy Nights
• The schools he went to and the unusual patchwork of education that fed his fertile young mind and set him on the path to being an author
• Some of his early writing and thoughts about being an author

This tour is part of a series of walks around Edinburgh dedicated to the life of the celebrated author. You can find the others by searching under Edinburgh or by selecting my author profile and seeing all my tours there.

The walking tour was devised by Martin White with much assistance from John Shedden, its narrator who has played Stevenson and recorded his works from the shores of Scotland to the Cevennes, Saranac and Samoa, final resting place of RLS. Martin is a native of Edinburgh and now promotes the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s time in the Lothians. He is a Director of the European Cultural Route In the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson. He runs the website www.mrrls.com which provides a great springboard for people to enjoy the Stevenson story.