• Landscape view looking out across a large body of water. Land is just visible on the horizon, there is a line of trees on the shore, and in the immediate foreground there is a rough stone wall.

An unfinished masterpiece by Robert Louis Stevenson

By Gillian Hughes Many of Stevenson’s longer works of fiction might be characterised as historical novels: in Weir of Hermiston Stevenson excavates Edinburgh’s Golden Age, that of Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg, and also its surviving physical traces in the…