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Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s earliest published works and is considered a pioneering classic of outdoor literature.Travels recounts Stevenson’s 12-day, 200-kilometre solo hiking journey through the sparsely populated and impoverished areas of the Cévennes mountains in south-central France in 1878. The terrain, with its barren rocky heather-filled hillsides, he often compared to parts of Scotland. The other principal character is Modestine, a stubborn, manipulative donkey he could never quite master. It is one of the earliest accounts to present hiking and camping outdoors as a recreational activity. It also tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags, large and heavy enough to require a donkey to carry.