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Hokitika Guardian, 7 November 1928, Page 7

[ should like to think that this contion of the road comes from the determination of those in charge of the island to preserve those romantic hours of royal escape. For. as I say, Prince Charlie’s day is still alive here. The rocks of the shore, the heather and tough grass, the stones cast upon the hillside as in despair of the prospect, the dark mountains of sacrifice behind, the eddying, half-soft, halfgusty air of all these—nothing has been destroyed through the energy of successive generations.

Floni Macdonald is buried in Kilnuiir churchyard nearby, under a tall Kellie cross. T missed seeing her grave, lor ns I made my way up that long heathside, the windworn, stained signpost led me astray. I was already belated. and when 1 perceived this there was no time to turn back. Hotter so. I thought. These things should not lx* made too easy of access. Let us in our time stray and fail and make small efforts and undergo disappointments, ere we attain to the spots which xront effort and noble disappointment have made famous. Poor little Flora; she came to live at Kingsburgh, the first place to which she smuggled the Prince, a little down the coast, with her husband, “completely Ihe figure of a gallant Highlander,” who, though they were not married then, had helped her on that memorable occasion.

Later .she went with him to America mid there, when the. war with the colonists arose, she and her husband throw themselves with similar devotion into the service of the cause of King George, for the Hanoverians had given her respect. Her husband was captured and imprisoned and she was left with her children in something not far from misery in a hut on a Carolina sandbank. till in a year or so he was released and they had to len.ve the country in which she had intended to found a new home. “T have served the Houses of Stuart and of Hanover,” she sadly said, “and what has either brought me?” Were are first thoughts, first impressions of Svke. which are more of its past than its present, but as much a part of its being, if you feel tbe spirit of the place, as tbe awesome Cool in heights, the screaming sea-birds, tbe peat-smoke, tbe pale blue distances, and the deep yellow fields of marguerites.

That this should be. so is tbe great achievement- of the island, both for itself and for those who visit it.

Has not the greatest traveller who ever trod these parts written, under their influence, “whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.’-'