WHERE precisely was Bonallie Tower, the house where Robert Louis Stevenson stayed before moving into the home that was bought for him at Westbourne?

A booklet by Lawrence Popplewell, who teaches at Bournemouth University, can answer that riddle, but he would love to locate a photo of the now demolished property.

"That," he said, "would be something of worldwide interest to scholars."

Interest in the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent three years living in Bournemouth, has been revived thanks to a TV documentary, a new BBC series based on his classic novel, Kidnapped, and a recently published biography.

Louis and his wife Fanny spent two years at the home he and his wife Fanny renamed "Skerryvore" at Westbourne.

Having been bombed in the war, it is today a memorial garden to the classic Scottish writer. While living there he published what are arguably his two greatest works, Kidnapped and The Strange Tale of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

What is less well known concerns the time he spent in Bournemouth prior to moving into Skerryvore, the home in Alum Chine Road that was bought for Louis and Fanny by his parents as a wedding present.

Lawrence Popplewell's booklet, The Search for Bonallie Tower, reminds us that back in 1884 when the Stevensons came to Bournemouth, the land to the west of Westbourne was essentially a wild and lonely place.

The Stevensons came to live in Bournemouth from July 12 of that year, staying first at the Highcliffe Mansions Hotel on the Westcliff that can still be found (as the Bournemouth Highcliff Marriott Hotel).

They then moved, on July 19, to Sunnington Rise, a guest house in West Cliff Gardens and, within a month, on to nearby Wensleydale in the same road. On Monday November 3, writes Mr Popplewell, they moved on to rent newly-built Bonallie Tower in Burton Road, which was then very much an outlying area. And there they stayed until moving into Skerryvore in mid-April 1885.

"This enigmatic upper Branksome Park house was to prove, in Stevensonian terms, their first long-term solution within the area, if also one subsequently badly neglected and often ignored in almost all 20th century literature," he says.

Lawrence Popplewell set about on some detective work to pinpoint its exact position.

By tracking down and studying every available map of the years from 1888 to 1915 and referring to newspaper cuttings and directories, he was able to identify the four original houses.

But which property was Bonallie Tower where the great character actor and theatre manager Beerbohm Tree visited Stevenson? It had, said Tree, "no knocker or bell but rather a gelatinous string swollen by the rain".

Popplewell describes the process of elimination that led to him identifying the very house that, he discovered, was later renamed Blythswood and that stood at 1 Burton Road.

It was the second house down from the corner house, for neighbouring Lissenden carried a Lindsay Road address.

Where is the site today? After years of research, the author concluded that it was demolished in the 1970s and now lies beneath the garages of a tower block called Lissenden that stands in Burton Road, close to Lindsay Road today.

So all that remains is to find that elusive picture of Bonnalie Tower, said Mr Popplewell.

"The surviving property next door was probably almost identical (without the tower) and probably by the same builder," he said. "But it is significant gap in the town's local record."

It is possible, he believes, that the Branksome Park Association who objected to the demolition plans in the 1970s might have a surviving photo? Or possibly Fox and Sons, estate agents, who were involved in the application for the new Lissenden flats that replaced the old houses?

The Melledgen Press has published more than 30 titles ranging from Radical Journalism in Poole and the Persecuted New Forest Shaker Community at Hordle.

The Search for Bonallie Tower: RLS in Branksome Park by Lawrence Popplewell, Melledgen Press, Southbourne, Bournemouth ISBN 0 906637 33 3