Old Ways New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720–1832

In 1725 an extensive military road and bridge-building programme was implemented by the British crown that would transform 18th-century Scotland. Aimed at pacifying some of her more inaccessible regions and containing the Jacobite threat, General Wade’s new roads were designed to replace ‘the old ways’ and ‘tedious passages’ through the mountains. Over the next few decades, the laying out of these routes opened up the country to visitors from all backgrounds. After the 1760s, soldiers, surveyors and commercial travellers were joined by leisure tourists and artists, eager to explore Scotland’s antiquities, natural history and scenic landscapes, and to describe their findings in words and images.

In this book a number of acclaimed experts explore how the Scottish landscape was variously documented, evaluated, planned and imagined in words and images. As well as a fascinating insight into the experience of travellers and tourists, it also considers how they impacted on the experience of the Scottish people themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Birlinn
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788855990

Book preview

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Old Ways New Roads

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Paul Sandby, Surveying Party by Kinloch (Loch) Rannoch (detail), 1748, watercolour, pen and ink (BL K.Top 50.832)

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First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 1 78027 667 0

Copyright © The contributors severally 2021

The right of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

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Typeset and designed by Mark Blackadder

Printed and bound in Latvia by PNB

CONTENTS

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Foreword

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. Writing the Scottish Tour 1720–1830

Nigel Leask

SECTION 1. The Theatre of War

John Bonehill

Chapter 2. The Ethnology of the ‘Old Ways’ in Gaelic Scotland

Hugh Cheape

SECTION 2. Antiquities

Nigel Leask

Chapter 3. Natural History

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

SECTION 3. Custom and Improvement

John Bonehill

Chapter 4. Roads, Bridges and Designed Landscapes on the Highland Circuit

Christopher Dingwall

Chapter 5. Scotland’s Prospects

John Bonehill

SECTION 4. Picturesque Prospects and Literary Landscapes

John Bonehill and Nigel Leask

Chapter 6. Portable Knick-knacks or the Material Culture of Travel

Viccy Coltman

Chapter 7. Panoramas and Landscape

Christina Young

Chapter 8. Picturesque Tours of Wales and Ireland

Mary-Ann Constantine and Finola O’Kane

Bibliography

Photograph Credits

Index

FOREWORD

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Mungo Campbell, Deputy-Director, The Hunterian

Over the past couple of decades, through a sustained programme of research and exhibition-making, The Hunterian has devoted particular institutional energy to a thorough re-evaluation of its eighteenth-century origins. While its founder William Hunter’s intellectual roots drew deeply on his Scottish Enlightenment upbringing and education, his collecting activities were mainly centred around London’s auction houses and book dealers and more widely across Europe. Having left Scotland in the early 1740s, Hunter rarely ventured far from London. He never made a European Grand Tour and he probably only returned to Scotland on a couple of occasions before his death in 1782.

Only one Scottish landscape painting is known to have entered Hunter’s collection. While The Hunterian’s subsequent benefactors have helped ensure that later nineteenth- and twentieth-century holdings of Scottish art are particularly strong, pre-Victorian representations of Scotland, by visitors to Scotland or Scots themselves, were long notable by their absence. Although significant acquisitions have been made to fill some of these gaps in the collections over the last twenty years, the proposal to develop the exhibition Old Ways New Roads was particularly welcome, making accessible as it does significant new research in this field undertaken among our wider academic community at the University of Glasgow. Much of this work has harnessed the rich resources held by Special Collections in the University Library. Their collaboration and enthusiasm for this project has, as always, been essential to its success.

The exhibition and publication appear just over forty years after the groundbreaking investigation of the subject undertaken by James Holloway and Lindsay Errington in the 1978 exhibition (The Discovery of Scotland) at the National Gallery of Scotland. As John Bonehill, The Hunterian’s Anne Dulau Beveridge and Nigel Leask have demonstrated repeatedly during the development of this project, while the nature of research around Scotland, and its landscape from the 1720s onwards, has been transformed over the intervening decades, nobody can venture into this field without acknowledging a significant debt of gratitude to their predecessors.

In assembling a variety of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century materials from an exceptionally wide and generous group of lenders, Old Ways New Roads offers a new and deeply compelling narrative about the Scottish landscape as it is experienced by the twenty-first-century visitor. Other projects, notably Guga: Exploring Gaelic Identities staged at The Hunterian in 2019, have sought to examine linguistic and material aspects of Scottish identity though strong collaboration with colleagues in the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow, and future projects will continue to challenge traditional material and museological approaches to these aspects of our collections. Rooted as deeply as possible in our historic collections, The Hunterian continues to ask important questions about contemporary Scotland.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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John Bonehill is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Glasgow, and has published widely on various aspects of eighteenth-century British art and culture.

Mary-Ann Constantine is Reader at the University of Wales Centre of Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies based at Aberystwyth. She has published widely on travel writing and the cultural history of eighteenth-century Wales.

Hugh Cheape is Professor at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands, and was formerly Principal Curator in the National Museums Scotland.

Viccy Coltman is Professor of eighteenth-century History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, who specialises in visual and material culture, with a special focus on Scotland.

Christopher Dingwall is an independent landscape historian with a special interest in garden history. He is a trustee and Vice Chairman of Scotland’s Garden and Landscape Heritage.

Anne Dulau Beveridge is Curator at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, with a strong focus on eighteenth-century British and French art.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is Associate Professor of British History at the University of Chicago, and an expert on political economy, history of science and environmental history.

Nigel Leask is Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow, and an expert on Romanticism, empire and travel writing.

Finola O’Kane is Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at University College, Dublin. She is an expert on the designed landscape history of Ireland and of the Atlantic world.

Christina Young is Professor of Conservation and Technical Art History at the University of Glasgow, and is a specialist in the history of painted canvas and theatrical scenery.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Research

The first debt to acknowledge is to the contributors to the publication: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Hugh Cheape, Viccy Coltman, Mary-Ann Constantine, Christopher Dingwall, Finola O’Kane and Christina Young. They have liberally shared their expert knowledge, and their respective chapters throw new light on many of the themes at the heart of this book. We are also very grateful to them for delivering their texts on time despite the usual constraints of tight schedules and other commitments.

Many colleagues in Glasgow and elsewhere have helped in various ways with research and enquiries, including Neil Clark, Jesper Ericsson, John Faithfull, Nicky Reeves and Joseph Sharples at The Hunterian; Julie Gardham, Robert Maclean, Kirsteen McCue, Sally Tuckett and Rhona Brown at the University of Glasgow; the Duke of Fife; Alison Diamond at Argyll Estates; Rory Powell and Scott MacDonald at Buccleuch Estates; Charlotte Rostek at Mount Stuart; Joannah Meacock at Glasgow Life; Keren Guthrie at Blair Atholl Estate; Patricia Allerston, Helen Smailes, Charlotte Topsfield and Hannah Brocklehurst at the National Galleries of Scotland; Kim Sloan at the British Museum; Michael Allan, Julie Gibb and Emily Taylor at the National Museums of Scotland; Charles Wemyss; Patricia Andrews and Iain Gordon Brown; Felicity Myrone, Alexandra Ault, Laura Walker, Barbara O’Connor and Tom Harper at the British Library; Paula Williams and Chris Fleet at the National Library of Scotland; Mary Miers; Charles Withers at Edinburgh University; Robin Rodger at the Royal Scottish Academy; Ailsa Hutton; Lorna Mitchell and Henry Noltie at the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh; Diana Simpson; William Murray; Julieann Koch, Stephen Daniels, and last but not least James Holloway.

Particular thanks are due to William Zachs and Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik for their support to the project, for generously facilitating access to their collections and for sharing their knowledge.

We also wish to acknowledge Mairi Sutherland at Birlinn for her skilful editing.

Substantial help in reading and commenting on drafts was received from Mungo Campbell. Thank you.

Support

In 2018 and 2019 two workshops, gathering contributors to the publication and researchers from different fields, were organised thanks to a grant from the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies; thanks are due to Catriona Macdonald for her enthusiasm towards the project.

The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art provided much appreciated help towards the cost of illustrations through its publication grant scheme.

The publication was made possible by a grant from the Gordon Fraser Charitable Trust, whose continuous generous support of The Hunterian’s publishing ventures has proved invaluable over the last two decades.

Photography

The most important groups of images reproduced in this publication are from William Zachs’s collection, the British Library, the British Museum, Glasgow Life, the University of Glasgow Collections, the National Galleries of Scotland and the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. A number of private collectors have been very generous in allowing access to their home for the commissioning of photography of works rarely, if ever, published before. Colleagues in Archives and Special Collections, University of Glasgow, have been equally accommodating when facilitating and organising new photography for works in our collections. Margaret Wilson, of National Museums Scotland, was generous in accommodating use of images at a late stage. We would like to record our thanks to all institutions and individuals who have efficiently and promptly assisted us in gathering the 200 or so colour images reproduced in the publication, particularly considering the exceptional circumstances during which they had to be compiled.

Special thanks are due to Alicia Hughes, ex-curatorial assistant at The Hunterian, who has tirelessly and cheerfully worked against many odds to gather illustrations, and to Antonia Reeve, for carrying out the photography of private collections despite the many challenges associated with the current circumstances. Details regarding specific photographic credits are at the end of this publication.

Loans

A number of individuals and institutions who have provided images for this publication have also kindly agreed to lend objects to the exhibition it accompanies. The exhibition will take place from 29 January to 9 May 2021 at The Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow.

The Hunterian would like to take this opportunity to thank Atholl Estate, the British Library, the British Museum, the Buccleuch Collections, Ian Gordon Brown and Patricia Andrew, Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik, Glasgow Museums, the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections, the Fife Collection, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Nigel Leask, Mount Stuart Trust, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, National Museums Scotland, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and William Zachs for their generosity.

John Bonehill, Anne Dulau Beveridge and Nigel Leask

INTRODUCTION

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In 1725 General George Wade, the newly appointed Commander- in-Chief of His Majesty’s Forces in North Britain, was tasked with overseeing a massive road- and bridge-building programme that would transform the Scottish landscape, connecting the ‘chain of forts’ constructed by the Williamite and Hanoverian monarchs in order to pacify the Highlands and tame any recurrent Jacobite military threat like that unleashed in 1715 and in 1719 (Fig. 0.1). Among other factors, government control had been severely stymied by Scotland’s ‘old ways’; the lack of a modern transport infrastructure over intractable terrain made many areas all but inaccessible and frustrated the movement of troops. Writing in the 1720s and 1730s, Edmund Burt, an English rent collector stationed at Inverness in the uneasy period between the two major Jacobite wars, complained that ‘the old Ways (for Roads I shall not call them) consisted chiefly of stony Moors, Bogs, rugged, rapid Fords, Declivity of Hills, entangling Woods, and giddy Precipices’ (Burt 1998, 282). Burt’s punning ‘old Ways’ also played on the link between archaic travel and Scotland’s traditional culture, both of which were being rapidly changed by the forces of enlightened, modern progress.1

In his Letters from the North of Scotland, eventually published in 1754, Burt weighed up some of the problems facing the topographer seeking to understand and master the mountainous crags of the Highlands, arguing: ‘if it had been possible for me to procure a Landskip (I should say Heath-skip or Rock-skip) of any one tremendous view among the Mountains, it would be satisfactory and informing at one single Cast of the Eye’ (Burt 1998, 154). However, the Highlands refused any such pictorialist control, ‘compose’d [as they are] of Hills . . . piled one upon another, till the Complication rises and swells to Mountains, of which the Heads are frequently above the Clouds’ (Burt 1998, 155: Macleod 2012, 22–23). They baffled the eye and put up obstacles against its smooth passage. Being composed of a palette of ‘a dismal gloomy Brown, drawing upon a dirty Purple’, there was only a sense of dreary monotony (Burt 1998, 157). So disorientating was the experience that the traveller unfamiliar with the ‘old ways’ was forced to ‘creep slowly on, between the Hills in rocky Ways, sometimes over those Eminencies, and often on their Declivity, continually hoping the next Ridge before you will be the Summit of the highest, and so often deceiv’d in that Hope, as almost to despair of ever reaching the Top’ (Burt 1998, 160). For Burt, this barren, inhospitable wilderness was an appropriate backdrop for the scenes of dirt, poverty, barbarity and superstition he claimed to witness among its peoples. It was as bleak and dull as their lives. What promised to alleviate their situation, economies and ways of life, as well as the ‘tedious passages’ of travellers in Scotland, was the construction of Wade’s military road network described and praised by Burt. In his final letter, he claimed that ‘the Roads on these Moors are [now] . . . as smooth as Constitution Hill, and I have galloped on some of them for Miles together in great Tranquillity’ (Burt 1998, 282–283).

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Fig. 0.1

Attributed to Johan Van Diest, Field-Marshall George Wade, c. 1731, oil on canvas (NGS PG 2416)

Wade was appointed Commander-in-Chief of North Britain in 1724 and sent to the Highlands in the same year. He spent the next eleven years supervising the building of over 250 miles of roads and forty bridges to open up the most inaccessible parts of the country. This portrait of Wade includes in the background soldiers building the military road between Dalwhinnie and Fort Augustus. Crossing the Corrieyairack Pass, the road included no fewer than eighteen traverses, a considerable engineering feat.

Over the next half century or more, the laying out of the new roads opened up Scotland not only to the forces of British militarism but also to commerce and trade, as well as to philosophical and scenic tourism, as a recent theatre of war became imbued with aesthetic and topographical significance. Sites and places, ancient and modern, ruinous and thriving, were brought into view by travelling along Wade’s roads, as well as those constructed by his successor Major William Caulfeild, and later (after the Parliamentary Roads Act of 1803) by the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford, not to mention the new canals and steamboat routes that further opened up Scotland’s most scenic regions and coasts in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Haldane 1952, 1962; Taylor 1976; Guldi 2012). Ironically, however, although travel writers routinely described the new roads and bridges, these seemed to hold little attraction for artists, and drawings and paintings are relatively scarce (George Heriot’s painting of Telford’s bridge at Dunkeld is, however, discussed in Chapter 5; see Fig. C5.15). Scotland’s ‘improvement’ saw investments in agriculture, mining and industry on large, powerful landed estates, and claimed a stake in urban developments, in the growth of coastal ports and ‘polite’ townscapes. For enlightenment improvers, such measures had a series of overlapping associations and benefits. Variously economic, moral and social, as well as aesthetic, they were held to better the lot of those who lived in, worked or viewed the landscape. The progress of improvement was uneven, however, often put into question and made the subject of anxious debate: in the Highlands especially, the difficulty of extracting income from such a harsh environment, burdened with a growing and often starving population, raised the spectre of the limits of economic growth, which has returned to haunt the twenty-first century (Jonsson 2013).

Above all, the forces of improvement targeted places of Jacobite support, which (despite developing commercial links with the Lowlands) had proved resistant to the influence of state formation, the expansion of Presbyterianism, and the English language (Youngson 1973; Devine 1994a; Macinnes 1996; Clyde 1998). Not everyone shared the Whig enthusiasm for a progressively ‘modern’ world, as Hugh Cheape demonstrates in Chapter 2: although the isolation of Highland society has been exaggerated by historians, it remains true that large areas were beyond the reach of Hanoverian rule until the 1750s, even after the vigorous repression of clan society following the battle of Culloden in 1746. Some places continued to be bypassed and left behind, or resisted the improving impulse; others were subsequently emptied of population and converted into sheep walks in the notorious clearances (Richards 2002; Devine 2018). But sites and places, old and modern, sometimes seen in instructive or troubling juxtaposition, were brought into view by travel along Scotland’s new transport arteries. Travellers’ encounters with local scenes in Scotland would evoke comparison with other places, and raise questions about the place of the past in a modernising present, or indeed the place of Scotland and Scottishness in newly minted and contested ideas of British identity (Leask 2020).

The development of the Scottish tour coincided with a rising interest in domestic tourism in the second half of the eighteenth century: some of the parallels with contemporary developments in the other ‘Celtic peripheries’ of Wales and Ireland are addressed by Mary-Ann Constantine and Finola O’Kane in Chapter 8. The British ‘home tour’ was also coterminous with two other dominant modes of travel, the European grand tour and global navigation, but was more within the reach of private individuals among the newly affluent middle classes with limited time and resources. (Viccy Coltman opens Chapter 6 with a description of John Elliot’s cabin on the long voyage out to India in order to highlight these connections.) There was a considerable overlap between the different forms of travel in the period – for example, Thomas Pennant’s 1772 Tour in Scotland was dedicated to the Pacific explorer Joseph Banks, who made his own tour of the Western Isles in the same year (Pennant 1998, xxvii–xxviii). Each modality spawned a huge number of publications, often lavishly illustrated with engravings and maps, so that travel literature became one of the most popular reading genres of the age: an interest in natural history, antiquarianism, ‘primitive’ lifestyles and landscape aesthetics was a feature of domestic as well as exotic and colonial travel writing.

Some forty years or so ago, The Discovery of Scotland, a pioneering, landmark exhibition curated in the National Gallery of Scotland by James Holloway and Lindsay Errington, explored ‘the appreciation of Scottish scenery’, principally through painting and largely over what might be termed the culture of ‘Balmorality’ (Holloway and Errington 1978). Though it extended the chronology either side to look at important precedents and the later legacy, its dependence on views of the Scottish landscape in oil paint which only became common in the mid nineteenth century meant that the focus somewhat inevitably fell heavily on the Victorian era. The present book and exhibition seek to retrace some of the steps first taken by The Discovery of Scotland, while also breaking new ground. Shifting the chronological focus back over the ‘long eighteenth century’, we seek to open up a range of different perspectives and priorities in the depiction of Scottish landscape by focusing on the connections between military occupation and the beginnings of modern tourism enabled by the new roads. By exploring these varied though often overlapping fields of knowledge and practice, we seek to demonstrate how the appreciation of the Scottish landscape was not a narrowly aesthetic matter. It was also a terrain of historical, philosophical and scientific enquiry, being remade by a potent mix of commercial, landed, military and political interests. Taken together, the literary and pictorial traces left by this dynamic activity projected a rich and complex range of variously complementary and competing visions of eighteenth-century Scottish land and life.

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Fig. 0.2

Alex Deans, Map of Petit and Long Tours, in Nigel Leask, Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour, c. 1720–1830 (Oxford, 2020), p. 15

Old Ways New Roads traces how some of these dramatic changes in the Scottish landscape were variously documented in word and image, evaluated, planned and imagined, and more especially ‘framed up’ in terms of the experience of travel. The eight chapters specially commissioned for this volume, which is published in association with The Hunterian exhibition Old Ways New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720–1832 (29 January to 9 May 2021), bring cross-disciplinary expertise to bear on many of the issues arising from this revolutionary transformation of Scotland’s infrastructure. From the 1760s, tourists began to follow in the footsteps of pioneers like Thomas Pennant, Dr Samuel Johnson and Joseph Banks in search of Scotland’s natural history, antiquities and ‘local manners’, explored here by Nigel Leask in Chapter 1, ‘Writing the Scottish Tour’. If, in earlier decades, the road-users were mainly soldiers, agriculturalists and businessmen, naturalists and mineralogists, after mid century these were joined by that broad range of society that identified themselves as polite, taking in the sedate scenic pleasures of the so-called petit tour or the wilder reaches of the Highlands on the ‘long tour’ (Fig. 0.2). Pennant seems to have been the first to coin the term petit tour to describe the shorter circuit of the Highlands (exemplified by Gilpin’s tour of 1776, shown in Fig. 0.2), which could be made in a fortnight by chaise travelling along the military roads, showcasing the ‘improved’ landscapes and plantations of the Atholl, Breadalbane and Argyll estates, which he described as ‘a tract unparalleled, for the variety and frequency of fine and magnificent scenery’ (Pennant 1979, 91). The long tour (represented here by Johnson and Boswell’s tour) offered a more ambitious itinerary for travellers with more time, money and endurance: it took in Inverness, the Great Glen, the Isle of Skye, and some of the other Western Isles including Mull, Iona, and Staffa, and involved hiring horses, boats and ferries. The majority of Scottish tours took place between spring and autumn, with August and September being the most popular months, for obvious reasons given the challenges of the climate.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s chapter on ‘Natural History’ examines the overriding concern with natural history on the Scottish tour (matched only by a concern for antiquities), from the circuits made by ‘economic botanists’ in search of new plant species, through an obsession with tree planting, and the researches of mineralogists and geologists in the early nineteenth century, to the travels of enthusiastic amateur naturalists in later decades (Fig. 0.3). After 1780, the proliferation of lavishly illustrated published tours meant that Scottish sites might be enjoyed without leaving the armchair. But nothing could beat experiencing the topography first-hand: artists and travel writers, as well as general readers, were inspired after 1760 by the sublime associations afforded to Scotland’s often barren landscapes by James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, the poetry and song of Robert Burns (himself a celebrated Highland tourist) and, latterly, Walter Scott’s best-selling verse romances and novels. The international currency of Ossian and the works of Scott inspired tourists from France, Germany, Poland and Italy, many of whom enriched the travel literature of their own cultures with published tours of Scotland. (Faujas de Saint-Fond, Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, Johanna Schopenhauer and Princess Izabela Czartoryska are referred to in the chapters that follow.) However, more work requires to be done on foreign tourists in Scotland in this period.2 In the earlier decades, publication of tours tended to be the preserve of male travellers (Pococke, Pennant, Boswell and Johnson) but in the wake of William Gilpin’s petit tour of 1776, eventually published after some delay in 1789, travellers from both sexes sought out sublime and picturesque scenery to complement their interest in antiquities and natural history, sketchbooks in hand, paving the way for the romantic appropriation of Scotland. Although only four British women published Scottish tours in this period, dozens of lively manuscript accounts survive in libraries and archives, and others were subsequently published, such as Dorothy Wordsworth’s magnificent Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, 1803 (Walker 1997).3 Given that the largest number of tourists were from south of the Tweed, it may well have been the case that ‘Scotland was formulated and re-formulated in response to English needs’ during a period of ‘consolidating Britishness’. But it is also true that ‘Scots were active participants in tourism, both as sightseers and promoters, and in so doing put forward their own variously complementary or competing definitions of Scotland’ (Glendening 1997, 10; Grenier 2005, 29). This was as true of the inhabitants of the Highlands as of the Lowlands, as Hugh Cheape reminds us in Chapter 2, underlining the extent to which Gaels were often themselves active agents, as well as passive objects of an anglocentric tourist gaze.

Travellers engaged with urban as well as rural scenes, reached along and off the coast, and took in the fertile lowlands as well as Scotland’s mountainous uplands and islands. They headed for sites of antiquity, natural wonders like mountains and waterfalls, as well as modern designed landscapes that in places employed such features to theatrical effect. Artists and writers, as discussed by John Bonehill in Chapter 5, would fashion their experience or the country’s myths and histories into highly imaginative narratives staged in these landscapes, exploiting the aesthetic conventions of the beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque. Although the romantic taste for the sublime has been linked to the devastating effect of clearances and the introduction of sheep faming in many areas of Scotland, travellers were often vocal in condemning economic policies that resulted in emigration and environmental degradation (Womack 1989). Of particular interest is the way in which the work of tour writers and artists was shaped by these places, as well as itself shaping subsequent descriptions and views of them. To this end, a number of pivotal sites are discussed in the essays collected here, notably Edinburgh, Dunkeld (‘Ossian’s Hall’), Staffa (‘Fingal’s Cave’) and the Falls of Clyde (Cora Linn; see Fig. S4.6), as well as Loch Katrine and the Trossachs, a relative latecomer to the tourist circuit, but one immortalised in Scott’s verse romance The Lady of the Lake (1810) (see Fig. S4.2). The relationship between estate management, layouts and tourism is addressed by Christopher Dingwall in Chapter 4, underlining the role played by powerful landowners in promoting tourism, especially the Dukes of Atholl and Argyll, and the Earls of Breadalbane, whose improved and landscaped policies (the areas immediately surrounding a house) were showcased on the petit tour.

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Fig. 0.3

Peter Mazell, Fucus verticillatus, engraving in John Lightfoot, Flora Scotica: Or A Systematic Arrangement, in the Linnaean Method, of the Native Plants of Scotland and the Hebrides (London, 1792), pl. XXXI opposite p. 962 (GLA ASC Mu53-d.29)

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Fig. 0.4

Anon., ‘The Author and his Companion in the Highlands’, frontispiece in John Bristed, Anthroplanomenos, or, A Pedestrian Tour through Part of the Highlands of Scotland, in 1801 (London, 1803) (GLA ASC Mu11-e.28)

At the heart of this book lies the ‘tourist paradox’ that the romantic fascination with the ‘old ways’ of the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands was made possible only by the modern infrastructure of the ‘new roads’, and later by bridges, canals, inns and steamboats. While pedestrian tourism appealed to those with a Rousseauvian taste for humble life, prepared to wander off the beaten track, the transport revolution meant that the Scottish tour became increasingly commodified from the early decades of the nineteenth century (Fig. 0.4). As the geologist John Macculloch observed haughtily in 1824,

the mystic portal has been thrown open, and the mob has rushed in, dispersing all these fairy visions, and polluting everything with its unhallowed touch. Barouches and gigs, cocknies and fishermen and poets, Glasgow weavers and travelling haberdashers, now swarm in every resting place, and meet us at every avenue. (Macculloch 1824, I, 195)

In Chapter 6, Viccy Coltman explores ‘knick-knack tourism’, the material manifestations of just such an emerging cultural practice, immediately prior to the age of railway travel, Victorian Balmoral, and the publication of Black’s and Murray’s travel guides. At the same time, as Christina Young demonstrates in Chapter 7, painted scenery for theatre and the new fashion for panoramas brought shows of Scottish scenery to an urban public. Loch Lomond could be experienced in a rotunda on Queen Street in Glasgow or the Mound in Edinburgh, or at the Theatres Royal in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London; the metropolitan public was now immersed in the hills and romantic myths of Scotland.

Since The Discovery of Scotland, the study of eighteenth-century culture has been subject to radical revision. Landscape, as a material terrain and a mode of representation, has been of central concern to that re-evaluation, not least because the complex issues at play necessarily involve dialogue between art historians, literary scholars, historical geographers and environmental historians. Of late, for instance, there has been a growing interdisciplinary interest with matters of topography, as a field of knowledge and enquiry (Myrone 2009; Barrell 2013).4 This has seen the genre reassessed as a way of knowing that combined observation and imagination, as well as movement and narrative, often as concerned with a proposed world as with a recorded world. Topography as a genre addressed the relation of people and places in manifold textual as well as visual ways. Especially relevant to our