Swanston Cottage

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19755

Title

p. 57a, Swanston Cottage, looking north from Swanston Village

Description

Swanston Cottage, Edinburgh sits in a snowy landscape. The surrounding fields are thickly blanketed with snow and only the dark outline of the bare trees and fences stand out against the white.

Artist / maker

Patrick, James

Date

1889

Size

14.2 x 20 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Thomas and Margaret Stevenson (Robert Louis Stevenson's parents) leased Swanston Cottage from 1867-1880. Stevenson would often visit them here and walk in the Pentland Hills. The village of Swanston grew up around Swanston Farm and originally consisted of ten thatched cottages. These included Swanston Cottage which was built in 1761. The thatched cottages were renovated in the 1960s and the site has further been developed to include a range of leisure facilities.

Born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and travel writer. Although he was plagued by ill health all his life, he was extraordinarily well-travelled, visiting Europe, America and the South Seas. He married American born Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880 and is best-known for works like Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (both 1886). From the late 1880s, Stevenson stayed in the South Pacific with his family on his own estate in Vailima in Samoa. He died here on the 3rd December 1894 of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 44, leaving what many consider his best work, Weir of Hermiston (1896) unfinished.

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Related subjects

Homes > Residential buildings > Cottages

Natural phenomena > Weather > Snow

Places > Edinburgh areas > Fairmilehead

Places > Scotland > Edinburgh

(55°53′41″N, 3°13′3″W)

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