Travellers to Wales

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This project will build on the work undertaken from 2013 to 2017 on the European Travellers to Wales 1750-2010 project, a collaboration between researchers in Modern Langages based at Bangor University, Swansea University and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and their partners at the National Library of Wales and the within the museum sector in Wales. Broadly speaking, the original project set out to explore the responses in travel writing of European travellers coming to Wales over a period of nearly three centuries. The research uncovered travellers' responses to Wales as a peripheral, at times unexpected nation with a culture often little known in the European context. Underpinning the project was the creation of a searchable open access database of accounts of travel (etw.bangor.ac.uk/accounts-of-travel) which now contains over 400 entries. This follow-on project aims to exploit the material held in this database by working with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Mouments of Wales and Visit Wales to help to promote Wales, its history, cultural heritage and landscape more widely to national and international audiences by developing an interactive mobile-friendly website that allows users (primarily but not exclusively from German and French-speaking Europe) to create themed travel routes through Wales and to access historical, site-specific material that interprets individual locations from the perspective of travellers through time (in particular the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). The interactive website will make this newly recovered historical material available to new, general audiences in a way which will have a positive impact on the tourist activity in Wales, in so doing contributing to one of the most important elements of the Welsh economy and targeting one of the key markets identified by Visit Wales. The development of this new website will exploit the unexpected quality and quantity of previously unknown or forgotten material dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which has been uncovered during the main research undertaken for the European Travellers to Wales project and which is now surfaced in the database. The material in question covers a period of great change in the landscape, culture and heritage of Wales and modern-day visitors will be able to 'experience' those changes through the eyes of their travelling predecessors, thus opening up a unique view of Wales to a new generation of travellers from Europe, but also casting a new light on the perception of Wales over time for visitors from the United Kingdom and other parts of the world. This will be made possible through the collation of exisiting digital materials and the development, using the expertise of the Royal Commission team, of new digital resources consisting of historical visual material, digital visualisation and reconstructions, panotours of gigapixel photography and Virtual Reality experiences. Downloadable materials will also be made available. The website will be hosted by Bangor University and promoted globally via the various platforms operated by Visit Wales.