Into the Wild: Travels in the Cévennes

“Over 12 days in the autumn of 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson and his capricious donkey Modestine walked 120 miles through the Cévennes, a remote French territory due north of Montpellier, where he met

impoverished peasants, silent monks, and lonely shepherds while reflecting on the region’s history of outlaw Protestants and a child-devouring beast. On the way, he climbed rugged windswept peaks, beheld boulder-strewn waterfalls that tumbled into crystalline pools “of the most enchanting sea-green”, and slept out of doors under a darkness so profound he called it “night within night”.

A century and a half later, the Cévennes national park remains much as Stevenson described it in his book Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes, and is still one of the darkest places on earth. So much so that in 2018 it was named an International Dark Sky Reserve, or “Réserve de ciel étoilé”, as the French more poetically call it. The park covers 361 square miles of France’s least populated countryside, a land inhospitable to highways, whose ancient expanse of ragged gorges, steep forested ridges, river-etched valleys and high-altitude plateaus still shelter a rugged way of life that has persisted for millennia. Home to dozens of protected plant, animal and bird species, including endangered eagles and vultures, the park may well be the closest thing to wilderness in France.”