Donkey trekking: Beast of burden, my ass

We stood by the side of the Stevenson Trail staring at the ranks of mountains rippling away into the hazy distance. This must have been the view Robert Louis Stevenson was describing in Travels with a Donkey. The book describes an autumn trip through the Cévennes with his donkey Modestine: "Peak upon peak, chain upon chain of hills ran surging southwards, channelled and sculptured by the winter streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts and here and there breaking out into a coronal of cliffs." The spot looked exactly right, a glorious example of the spectacular scenery here. We'd had a similar revelation, that sense of identification, on top of Mont Lozère, the highest point of the trail, when we'd gazed down at the "land of intricate blue hills", as Stevenson had. Then Kenneth, our donkey, languidly turned his head to bite a chunk out of the dog's water bowl, which was strapped to the panniers, and started munching. As Stevenson had found, donkeys sometimes had a habit of making things difficult.

I had first come across the Stevenson Trail, a 212km walk along the spine of the Cévennes from Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille to St-Jean-du-Gard, while on holiday in France. I'd picked up a leaflet with a charming picture of a donkey carrying a toddler fast asleep between its ears. I was enthralled by the idea. (It's true that for a brief optimistic moment I thought we'd be riding, too.) Molly, a friend from university now living in Provence, had also heard about the trail and rather liked the idea of walking it. She wasn't too sure about doing it with donkeys. But, fired with enthusiasm, I believed that we should make the journey exactly as Stevenson had. Well, up to a point.

In 1878 Stevenson was melancholy after the love of his life had returned to America. In dire need of money, he set out for a walk with his donkey Modestine in order to write about it. He took with him all his provisions and equipment including one of the first sleeping bags, constructed to his own design, and had no detailed maps. We had the advantage of a well-signed trail following the path he'd taken. This was marked out in the early 1990s by L'Association "Sur le Chemin de Robert Louis Stevenson", formed to take advantage of the tourist potential of Stevenson's journey. It also produced a list of donkey hirers and donkey bed-and-breakfasts where the donkey would be fed - and so would we.

Our first trip was fairly disastrous. Gilles Romand, the donkey hirer Molly had found, was based in Pradelles, a pretty medieval mountain village on the route. We decided that we, with Molly's golden labrador Whiskey, would make an exploratory expedition from there for a couple of days. But our first donkey, Noisette, was, extraordinarily, even slower than us. We kept being reminded of Gilles' parting words: "Stevenson must have had a job. You need two people with a donkey, one to push and one to pull." We also quickly discovered we were utterly incompetent at handling the outdoor life. I had borrowed boots, which were the wrong size. We had no guidebook so Gilles lent us his, but it was out of date. We used Travels with a Donkey to guide us, another mistake. When Stevenson, like us, was on his way to Cheylard l'Evêque, he'd written: "A man, I was told, should walk there in an hour and a half; and I thought it scarce too ambitious that a man encumbered with a donkey might cover the same distance in four hours." I had read that to Molly and we'd been much encouraged. Had I read on, we might have been less cheerful: he didn't actually make it that day.

We, too, managed to get completely lost, walked 30km instead of 20, the last part along the road, and, when rain threatened, discovered we'd left our waterproofs behind. The next day we were hugely relieved to find that Whiskey's paws were raw from walking along the road. We would have to curtail the trip.

If it had been up to me I would have left it at that. But by the time we had returned to Pradelles in Gilles' van, a journey that took an indecently short time, Molly had decided that we should do the whole thing properly. So the following year we went back and, rather better equipped, set out from Le Monastier, in the first of a series of trips with a series of donkeys and a changing cast of other companions.

Mainly we did our walking in May, a glorious time of the year in the mountains, with hillsides blazing yellow with broom, and meadows suffused with flowers. But we also walked in the autumn, around the same time as Stevenson, with trees turning gold and red, leaves crunching underfoot, and we all - donkey as well as humans - gorged ourselves on blackberries and late raspberries.

Walking with donkeys has distinct advantages, like not having to carry luggage and having someone else to talk to when conversation runs out. But it wasn't all straightforward. Our second donkey was Jeep, a young energetic male - but he didn't like dogs, which was a problem when one member of the party was Whiskey. Our third, and the one we then remained faithful to, was Kenneth - soft-coated and dark-eared, with a pragmatic and accommodating nature, whose only shortcoming was a tendency to rush downhill rather fast. Sometimes it took two of us to halt his headlong progress. As we went on, we learnt a lot about donkeys and their foibles, some of which led us to think, after it was all over, that writing about our journey might be useful for others who intend to do the trail (and reassure those who don't).

We even learnt how to attach the panniers properly after a ridiculous episode when, much pleased with our packing skills, Molly and I left a village, calling out cheery greetings to an elderly bystander. Moments later he alerted us to the fact that the panniers were now slung below Kenneth's tummy.

The advantage of doing it our way rather than in Stevenson's more intrepid style was that each evening we could bed the donkey down in field or stable - and then be tended to ourselves. The food was often exceptional. In one gîte we stayed in - along with a mixed gang of cyclists, motorcyclists and walkers - we had a seven-course meal, each served on the same plate which we wiped clean with the copious supplies of bread.

At the Hotel des Cévennes in Pont de Montvert, where Stevenson also stayed, the high point was the meal with our personal tureen of vegetable soup, lamb in red wine sauce, plum tart and tea made with fresh verbena leaves. Stevenson, however, was more concerned with the "cow-like charms" of Clarisse the waitress. (Perhaps he wasn't so lovelorn after all.) Unlike us, he wasn't interested in food. Practically his only description of it is the "hard fish and omelette" he ate in St-Nicholas-le-Bouchet. That was the village where our meal started with an aperitif of rare gentian wine and finished with homemade strawberry ice-cream accompanied by wild strawberries and almond biscuits. Thinking about the next meal was often what kept us going: it's no wonder that food figures greatly in our book.

There were other differences. When Stevenson visited the monastery of Notre Dame des Neiges, it was to engage in spiritual debate with the monks and other guests on retreat. When we visited - though we arrived in time for the midday office, joining the rows of white-robed monks while they sang psalms as they had done for centuries - it was to engage in consumerist browsing in the supermarket-style shop which was crammed with monastery-produced wines, liqueurs, chocolates and honey.

And then there was his energy. When he reached St-Jean-du-Gard, Stevenson sold his donkey Modestine in a great hurry and scurried off to Alès in a carriage, to see if there were any letters waiting for him. It had taken him, a consumptive invalid with aching heart, 12 days. It took us, two healthy females, 17 days spread over four years. It gave us an increased respect for Stevenson. But, then, we did have more donkeys to deal with.

'Downhill All the Way: Walking with Donkeys on the Stevenson Trail' by Hilary Macaskill and Molly Wood (£12.99; Frances Lincoln)

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

Getting there:

The nearest rail hub is at Le Puy-en-Velay, accessible via Paris and Lyon from London Waterloo and Ashford (Rail Europe: 08708 371 371; www.raileurope.co.uk).

Otherwise, British Airways (0870 850 9850; www.ba.com), easyJet (0905 821 0905; www.easyJet.com) and Ryanair (0871 246 0000; www.ryanair.com) fly to nearby Lyon.

To reduce the impact on the environment, you can buy an "offset" from Equiclimate (0845 456 0170; www.ebico.co.uk) or Pure (020-7382 7815; www.puretrust.org.uk).

Donkey trekking:

Donkey hire from Gilles Romand, Rue de l'Entressac, Pradelles (00 33 4 71 00 87 88; www.bourricot.com; e-mail: gilles.romand@wanadoo.fr).

Other donkey hirers (and places to stay) are in the leaflet "Suivre les traces de R L Stevenson", available from the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail Association (00 33 4 66 45 86 31; www.chemin-stevenson.org).

More information:

National Association of Donkey Trekking: www.ane-et-rando.com

French Government Tourist Office: 09068 244123, calls 60p/min; www.franceguide.com