In July 1817 the Court of Sessions closed for the summer break and Walter Scott, freed from his daily grind, set off to scout out the lands of the clan MacGregor (Glasgow and the lands immediately north) for a projected novel about the folk-hero Rob Roy. He took particular pains to visit Rob Roy's cave at the north end of Loch Lomond and then curiously failed to write about it in the book. On his return to Abbotsford he set about writing Rob Roy, for which his publisher was already starting to take advanced orders on a huge scale. Scott thought he could finish it within a couple of months at the outside, but an inveterate multi-tasker he continued to take on other projects (penning introductions for other books, an article on 'chi

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Published 17 June 2002

Citation: Uglow, Nathan. "Rob Roy". The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 June 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2346, accessed 9 February 2010.]