The Stevenson Trail: Following Literary Footsteps Through the Cevennes

Le Puy-en-Velay – 30 July 2026: France 2’s lunchtime news featured the Stevenson Trail in the Cevennes on Thursday – a long-distance hiking route where literary history, mountain landscapes and the yearning for a slower summer converge. The GR 70 crosses the southern Massif Central, where granite plateaus, chestnut forests and remote hamlets shape each stage.

The signposted trail runs for 272 kilometres from Le Puy-en-Velay to Alès, crossing Velay, Gévaudan, Mont Lozère and the Cevennes. It is usually completed in twelve to fourteen daily stages. It owes its name to the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who travelled through the region in the autumn of 1878 with the donkey Modestine.

The hike resulted in Stevenson’s 1879 travel account “Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes”. The book is more than a record of distances and lodgings: it combines precise observations of nature with inner dialogues, encounters and the occasionally stubborn partnership between human and pack animal. This combination explains why the trail is still regarded today as a travel diary that can be walked.

However, the famous name does not overshadow the landscape’s distinctive character. The Cevennes are a mid-mountain region of rugged heights, deeply cut valleys and a long Protestant history. Those following the GR 70 do not pass through a museum-like literary circuit. The trail demands endurance while also leading through villages whose inns, hostels and small shops sustain the local hiking culture.

The route gained recognition beyond France through Caroline Vignal’s 2020 comedy “My Donkey, My Lover & I”. Laure Calamy plays a teacher who follows her married lover and sets off with a donkey. The landscape does not serve merely as a pleasing backdrop in the film: climbs, rain, exhaustion and the animal’s stoic presence give the romantic comedy its rhythm.

Calamy received the 2021 César Award for Best Actress for the role. The film’s success turned the donkey on the Stevenson Trail from a historical companion into a popular cultural figure. However, it is not a prop for hurried holiday fantasies: hikes with a pack animal require consideration, planning and a pace adapted to the animal. The official trail association therefore provides information for tours both with and without a donkey.

The television feature thus takes up a summery form of travel in which it is not the number of places visited that matters, but the duration of the journey. On the GR 70, landscape and literature unfold step by step – over long climbs, changing weather and through the villages that Stevenson already passed on his journey in 1878.