Escape from the city
'Then I got out an atlas and looked at a big map of the British Isles. My notion was to get off to some wild district, where my veldcraft would be of some use to me, for I would be like a trapped rat in a city.'
— Chapter 2: The milkman sets out on his travels.
Much of the action and excitement of 'The thirty-nine steps' centres around an eventful journey from London to Scotland, and a fast-paced chase around the countryside of southern Scotland.
Richard Hannay is a man on the run. After finding the body of freelance spy Franklin P Scudder in his London home, Hannay decides that he must escape to remote countryside to escape from the unseen enemy, and from the police who will suspect him of murder.
He plans an escape route to Scotland using a map of the British Isles and a copy of 'Bradshaw's', the essential railway guide.
'A search in Bradshaw informed me that a train left St Pancras at 7.10, which would land me at any Galloway station in the late afternoon.'
— Chapter 3: The adventure of the literary innkeeper.
Making tracks
'I fixed on Galloway as the best place to go. It was the nearest wild part of Scotland, so far as I could figure it out, and from the look of the map was not over thick with population.'
— Chapter 2: The milkman sets out on his travels.
Hannay makes a mad dash from his home in Portland Place, Marylebone, disguised as a milkman, and heads for St Pancras Station. Many of the locations which feature in 'The thirty-nine steps' were familiar to John Buchan, and he himself lived in Portland Place from 1912 until 1919.
St Pancras Station — where Hannay started his railway journey — is featured in this 1914 film:
Hannay does not decide on a specific destination until required to buy a ticket from the guard on the train. This is when he somehow remembers the town of Newton-Stewart, a small market town on the banks of the River Cree in south-west Scotland. He would have travelled on the now defunct Midland Railway, and the journey would have taken him through Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire before crossing into Scotland.
1914 railway map.
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On the run in Scotland
'…we rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and then to a great wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs, with high blue hills showing northwards.'
— Chapter 3: The adventure of the literary innkeeper.
After travelling north to Dumfries, Hannay arrives at a remote station somewhere in Galloway, and so begins his journey and pursuit across the moorland of south-west Scotland. He travels across the landscape by foot, train and car as the story and chase gathers momentum.
The action later moves to the Scottish Borders, and this is the setting for Hannay's encounters with the 'Spectacled Roadman' (chapter 5) and the 'Bald Archaeologist' (chapter 6). Buchan was very familiar with this landscape where he spent many summer holidays as a boy.
Although some local landmarks, such as the Devil's Beef Tub, Moffat, are described in the novel, Buchan's particular skill was in capturing and evoking the landscape and atmosphere of this part of Scotland which he knew so well.
Journey's end
After his adventures in Scotland, Hannay catches a train near Moffat and travels back south via Crewe, Birmingham, Oxford and Berkshire. The village of Kintbury, between Newbury and Hungerford, is thought to be the inspiration for Artinswell in the novel.
The story then moves to London, and finally to the seaside town of Bradgate, which is modelled on Broadstairs in Kent where Buchan had spent a holiday in 1914. The 'steps' in the title of the novel are located in Broadstairs, leading down to Stone Bay.