Walking the Rob Roy Way and reading “Rob Roy”

As the three of us, Sassenachs all, walked the first two stages of the Rob Roy Way, we read Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy (well, two of us did). It’s a fine combination that I recommend to all: the legs, the brain, and the soul are exercised at once. We were walking the Way because one of us had been given a book on the Rob Roy Way and told that it is an easy walk for the old or feeble, divided into ten-mile stretches and with no difficult climbs. (Between us we are aged 230.) We weren’t sure whether Rob Roy was real or a Scottish equivalent of Robin Hood, but we soon learnt that Robert Roy MacGregor (1671–1734) was a Jacobite Scottish outlaw who became a Scottish folk hero. Scott writes about him at the end of his novel: “he died in old age and by a peaceful death, some time about the year 1733, and is still remembered in his country as the Robin Hood of Scotland, the dread of the wealthy, but the friend of the poor, and possessed of many qualities, both of head and heart, which would…