’Your life shall be like the hunted deer’s, and ye’ll sleep with your hands on your weapons. Either take to the heather with me. Or else hang’, Alan told David after the shooting of the Red Fox.
Ian Nimmo also took to the heather, clamped down in it as darkness fell, supped dramach, guddled for trout and shared their fugitive lives over some of Scotland’s wildest and most spectacular country. Now not only is he regarded as an authority on the Appin Murder, but also on the life of Robert Louis Stevenson.
What makes Ian Nimmo’s account so interesting is that he explores the kidnapped route across Scotland through three eras – as it was after the ’Forty Five, the setting of Kidnapped, as he found it forty years ago when he first tramped the Kidnapped trail, and noticing the dramatic changes on the route today, which are altering the very nature and character of Scotland.
Ian Nimmo was a newspaper editor for 21 years before his retirement. He spent a lifetime in journalism serving eight newspapers, three of them as editor. In Edinburgh, he was editor of the Evening News for twelve years and the former editor of the old Weekly Scotsman. He also worked for a time in television with the BBC Tonight programme and is the author of several books, many scripts, including a Scottish musical performed in the Playhouse Theatre, Edinburgh, during the 1997 international festival. A former officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, he now acts as a publishing consultant at home and abroad. He lives on a Borders hill farm at Lamancha and is married with three grown-up children. He is Chairman of the Robert Louis Stevenson Club.
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