Kidnapped: David Balfour Across the Highlands

David's misfortune starts at a ferry pier on the Firth of Forth. At the narrows the Queensferry pier serves the ferry, and on the road beside it stands "the building which they called the Hawes Inn". Ransome the cabin boy leads him there, and Ebenezer hands his nephew over to Captain Hoseason, who has David taken aboard the brig. At the end of the book David walks back past the same inn, which he calls "the scene of my misfortune", walking with a lawyer.

The brig strikes a reef close under the southwest end of Mull, "off a little isle they call Earraid". David is washed ashore and believes he is marooned, living on limpets and cold and hunger for "close upon one hundred hours". The joke is on him: Earraid is a tidal islet that can be crossed on foot at low water, and he had only to sit and watch the tide. The wreck itself lies on the Torran Rocks, to the south.

Crossing by boat into Appin, David is set ashore under the wood of Lettermore. There a shot rings out from higher up the hill and Glenure falls on the road, crying "O, I am dead!" The scene comes from a real crime: Colin Campbell was shot in the back in the wood of Lettermore near Duror on 14 May 1752. Stevenson's fictional version of the Appin murder drives the rest of the story, because the hunt for the killer drags David and Alan into the flight.

Location precision: The novel names the wood of Lettermore but not the exact spot; the pin marks the village of Duror nearby.

Hunted across the heather, Alan declares that the one hope is a wild, desert mountain: "Its name is Ben Alder." Up a steep wooded slope they find the hideout known as Cluny's Cage, a wattle house with moss walls where "a tree, which grew out from the hillside, was the living centre-beam of the roof". It is based on fact: the real Cluny MacPherson hid for nine years on the slopes of Ben Alder.

Location precision: The novel puts the Cage on Ben Alder without naming its exact hillside; the pin marks the mountain.

Alan and David reach the Braes of Balquhidder, a part of the Highlands where no great clan held rule. It was filled with small septs and "chiefless folk", driven into the country about the springs of Forth and Teith by the advance of the Campbells. After a bitter quarrel on the road, Alan knocks at the first house they reach. Rob Roy had lived and died in Balquhidder, which gives the glen its outlaw reputation.

Location precision: The novel names the Braes of Balquhidder generally; the pin marks the village.

On the run, the pair wade ashore and make for the Bridge of Stirling, keeping to the field fences. David sees it "close under the castle hill, an old, high, narrow bridge", but Alan is wary and will not push straight across, though no guard seems to watch it. The stone bridge was built around 1500, had an arch destroyed in December 1745 and rebuilt in 1749, and was closed to wheeled traffic in 1833.

Visitor guidance: The bridge is a scheduled monument beside the newer road bridge, closed to wheeled traffic.