RLS Club members follow in author’s footsteps on Caithness tour
When a 17-year-old from Edinburgh arrived in Wick for work experience building the new breakwater, nobody could guess he would become an international best-selling author.
His main task was struggling to erect marker poles in a heavy swell to show where his father’s firm should build the ill-fated structure – a far cry from penning Treasure Island, Kidnapped or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
And for the young Robert Louis Stevenson, Wick was an education, not just in the challenges of engineering but in learning about life there in the autumn of 1868.
Now members of the RLS Club, founded in his honour in 1920, have been following in his footsteps on a three-day visit to Caithness, visiting places mentioned in his letters home.
They began with Wick Heritage Museum to experience the busy harbour in the herring season, which had ended in such a disappointing catch that the authorities feared a riot, calling in extra police and two gunboats.
Young Stevenson, shivering in a “black wind”, encountered Gaelic-speaking fishermen from Lewis, “lubberly, stupid, inconceivably lazy and heavy to move. You bruise against them, tumble over them… they will not budge, and you are forced to leave the pavement at every step.”
Yet despite first impressions of a cold, bleak town, notoriously describing it as “one of the meanest of man’s towns… on the baldest of God’s bays”, he found Wick had a warm heart.
At the New Harbour Hotel, the hospitality included herring and finnan haddie for breakfast, Latheron cheese rolls and sherry to warm him after the morning’s work on the breakwater, then “heaps o’ things” for dinner at night, with beer, wine and a nightcap, all for four shillings and fourpence.
Today’s visitors had a glimpse inside the building, which now houses the editorial office of the John O’Groat Journal and Caithness Courier, with a warm welcome from reporter Alan Hendry.
And there was a similar welcome at Wick Heritage Museum, where volunteers Lyn Morrison and Ian Leith shared a wealth of local knowledge about Wick in its herring heyday and Stevenson’s time there.
He enjoyed exciting times – witnessing a shipwreck at Shaltigoe, taking part in the rescue of a workman who fell off the breakwater, and donning a heavy suit and helmet for a glimpse under the waves with Wick diver Bob Bain.
In this green, underwater world he could jump to a great height until “even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued their ascent, so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow”.
But Stevenson’s letters to his mother were more about the welcome he received from local people, from Admiral Rutherford, the Pulteneytown harbour master, to the family of Sheriff Hamilton Russell.
The visitors were able to see the home in Breadalbane Terrace where Stevenson spent many happy hours with the Russells’ son Adam and daughter Sara.
With them he enjoyed a romantic after-dinner moonlit stroll to the Old Man of Wick, where he paired off with Sara while Adam flirted with the daughter of customs officer Caleb Cox, leaving Sara’s companion Miss Latta as a gooseberry.
The visitors recreated the walk in less romantic circumstances, braving the Wick haar, and also viewed the cave where Stevenson found the male inhabitants were always drunk, “the great villainous looking fellows either sleeping off the last debauch, or hulking about the cove ‘in the horrors’”.
Later he visited Thurso and stayed at the Royal Hotel after a long journey via Castletown in a coach with a “load of Hebridean fishers”. And he was back there a year later with his father on an inspection tour of Stevenson lighthouses.
Today’s visitors followed in their footsteps to Holborn Head, where the lighthouse keeper was “in such a woundy fright, growing redder and redder and breathing hard in mortal terror” for fear Stevenson’s father would not find the light in good order.
The RLS Club minibus called also at the Stevenson lighthouses at Dunnet Head and Noss Head, and also at Ackergill Tower.
There young Stevenson was shown around by its chatelaine, Elizabeth Wemyss, and chatted with her young son Will, a midshipman in the Navy who had been invalided out with consumption, of which he would die two years later.
As the visitors headed home – on more comfortable transport than the Wick mail on which Stevenson departed, getting out and walking to spare the horses at Berriedale Braes – it was with happy memories.
