His family moved to Fife where he grew up along the coast. The woods in which he played with his sister Anna and his brothers Walter and William became the setting for imaginary adventures based partly on family stories and partly on the Bible and
Pilgrim's Progress . In the border country near Peebles and Broughton (where his mother's family lived) Buchan found new vistas for his imagination in reenacting stories from Scottish history. As he grew older and explored the countryside, first on foot and then by bicycle, he added to a store of places where his fictional characters would live, fight, and even die.
Climbing the Tweedside hills led to greater efforts, the Swiss Alps and the Dolomites in particular. At Oxford (Brasenose College), where he took his First in Literae Humaniores (Greats), he did not go out for team sports, but he participated in some strenuous activities. In his autobiography, Pilgrim's Way (1940; originally published as Memory Hold-the-Door, 1940), he speaks of canoeing, walking to the limit of his strength, or riding a course marked out on a map.
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