Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760-1815

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The Curious Travellers Project will collect, present and analyse a significant body of material relating to the phenomenon of the Welsh and Scottish Tour as it developed in the years c.1760-1815. It will open a window onto the vivid and often entertaining accounts of scores of 'curious travellers' who headed for the peripheries of Britain in search of the primitive, the picturesque and the sublime - and often found the foreign, and the unsettling, surprisingly close to home. Our starting point is the work of naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant of Downing (1726-1798), whose pioneering tours in Scotland and Wales (1771-1781) were widely read, directly inspiring the Highland journey of Johnson and Boswell and hundreds of others. His 'omnivorous' style, drawing on information from an imposing network of correspondents, weaves together natural history, antiquarianism, literature, history, aesthetics and politics.Often cited as an authority or an influence, Pennant's work has received little attention in its own right: the archive is scattered and difficult to use. The first aim of the project is to catalogue the many hundreds of letters to and from Pennant, and present them in a searchable data-base. This tool will improve our knowledge of the antiquarian, scientific and literary networks of the period, and allow us to trace both Pennant's careful preparation and information gathering, and the complex development of the composite and much-revised texts of the Tours themselves.The 'transperipheral' nature of Pennant's Tours (as a Welshman, albeit with unionist sympathies, exploring Scotland and his native Wales), along with their importance to later writers and travellers, make them an ideal point from which to investigate travel-writing from Wales and Scotland after 1760, when an improved transport infrastructure and a new sense of British identity inspired an increasingly affluent middle class to explore their national peripheries. Hundreds of published and manuscript accounts of tourist experiences form a still largely untapped resource for the study of history, material culture, literature and language. The second aim of the project is to make a generous selection of unpublished Tours of Wales and Scotland available online, each with a short contextualizing introduction and linked to a series of maps and pictures. In the light of recent work on global exploration in this period (Cook's Pacific voyages; the travels of Joseph Banks) the parallel 'exploration' of Britain needs critical reassessment. The domestic tour was an extraordinarily successful genre, second only to novels and romances, but has been relatively little studied. Yet it arguably played an important role in the construction of national histories, both at a 'four nations' level, and in a larger British context. Travel-writing uncovered the past in the landscape, through sites (cromlechs, churches, castles) popular culture (language, costume, song, and 'national character'), objects and images (antiquities, landscapes). Because landscape-writing and antiquarianism are often seen as conservative forms, the politics of the tour as a genre in this period is rarely considered. How far, during a period of revolution and war, did native histories, and the Celtic languages, disrupt that larger narrative of Britishness and of national 'improvement'? Pennant's Tours, for example, despite his unionist stance, were readily absorbed into nationalist discourses in both Wales and Scotland. In considering how the tour genre helped to 'create' versions of British history, the project will examine travellers' engagement with vernacular Celtic cultures (poetry and song), and ask how far their perceptions were influenced by contemporary ideas from science and art. Besides producing two new electronic resources, we will explore these issues through an informative dynamic website, 2 monographs, articles, a volume of essays, conferences, events and exhibitions.