Cornwall

In the history of Cornwall’s integration into the national transport network, 1859 is an oft-cited date. In that year Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge, which spanned the River Tamar between Plymouth and Saltash, brought the Cornwall Railway down the peninsula to Truro, where, from a separate station, the West Cornwall Railway line went on to Penzance. But the history of the railway in Cornwall begins much earlier. In the mining district of Redruth, William Murdock’s three-wheel steam carriage, made in 1784, frightened the local vicar, who mistook it for Satan himself. Similarly, in 1802 Richard Trevithick secured a patent for his four-wheeled steam carriage for use on roads, which terrified a turnpike keeper who dared not ask for payment in fear of ‘the snorting novelty’.¹⁸ In the early and mid-nineteenth century, the development of railways in Cornwall was for the purpose of transporting tin and copper from the mines of Redruth to the port at Hayle, and for receiving consignments of coal from south Wales. This line opened for mineral traffic in 1839, took passengers from 1841, and became known as the West Cornwall Railway as it was extended in both directions to Penzance and then to Truro. From an economic perspective, the railway connected Cornwall with other industrial centres in these isles long before Brunel’s bridge crossed the Tamar.

Nevertheless, 1859 remains the key date in the history of tourism, before which time the Cornish people, wrote the clergyman Victor Whitechurch, ‘had not yet realised that railway travelling meant more than a local excursion’.¹⁹ In 1859 Cornwall was connected to the national railway network, opening up the duchy for tourist traffic, which quickly grew in the following decades. In 1860 Thomas Cook established a package tour that went all the way to Land’s End, and by 1871 the occupation ‘Guide to Land’s End’ appeared on the census.²⁰ The extension of railway lines and the reduction of travel times was in part driven by competition between the London and South-Western Railway and the Great Western Railway. By the end of the nineteenth century the London and South-Western Railway’s North Cornwall Express service ran from London Waterloo to Padstow. After buying up the South Devon Railway and the Bristol and Exeter Railway in 1876, the Great Western Railway incorporated the West Cornwall Railway into its system from 1878 and ran its broad-gauge stock all the way from Paddington to Penzance. The transport network continued to expand, as contractors secured loans for the construction of branch lines, which were then acquired by the Great Western Railway. In 1877 a new four-mile branch line ran from St Erth along Carbis Bay to St Ives, and in 1887 a narrow-gauge branch line reached Helston, bringing travellers closer to the Lizard Peninsula. After the Great Western Railway finished converting its broad-gauge lines to narrow gauge in 1892, further extensions took the railway along the northern coast when a new station opened at Perranporth in 1903, which was later linked up with Newquay in 1905.²¹

The chief attractions of Cornwall were its cliffs, coves, seascapes and fishing villages, and tourists were duly advised to keep to the coastline when planning their trip. Typically, guidebooks recommended that visitors enter the county from Plymouth and travel down the southern coast to Penzance, perhaps taking a trip to the Scilly Isles, before returning back along the northern coastline to Tintagel and Boscastle, and exiting via Tavistock or Exeter. By the 1880s many of Cornwall’s most popular destinations were readily accessible by the main and branch lines. Tourists frequented towns such as Fowey, St Austell, Truro, Penryn and Falmouth in the south, and the railway also passed through St Ives, Portreath and Newquay in the north. Murray’s Handbook for Cornwall (1879) encouraged tourists to come to this western periphery safe in the knowledge that ‘even the remote corners of Cornwall can now be nearly reached by the ramifications of the Great Western and South-Western Railways’.²² Despite the decline in the Cornish mining industry, the economic value of this network lay in the transportation of produce such as potatoes, broccoli, narcissi, daffodils, wall flowers and mackerel, which found markets in London, the Midlands, and as far away as Scotland and Ireland. But income from passenger receipts was increasingly significant. The number of passengers on the Cornwall Railway rose from an annual average of 565,821 in the 1860s to 852,429 in the 1880s. This growth continued into the early twentieth century: transport historian Jack Simmons calculated that ‘average annual receipts from passengers booked at Penzance’ were up 57.6 per cent for the period 1904–10 when compared with the period 1890–96.²³

However, the story of growing tourism in Cornwall is not simply one of an extending railway network. The Lizard Railway and the Penzance, Newlyn and West Cornwall Railway were among many proposed light railway schemes that were never realised.²⁴ Instead, places situated between or beyond railway stations were knitted together by horse-drawn coaches and, from the early twentieth century, motor omnibus services. Coaches and motorbuses shuttled between the railway stations, town centres and many of Cornwall’s most famous destinations including Land’s End, Tintagel and Kynance Cove on the Lizard Peninsula. In 1883, the tourist wishing to visit Land’s End could take the omnibus service which left Penzance at nine o’clock in the morning and arrived at its destination two hours later, before returning to Penzance at three in the afternoon.²⁵

Perhaps the most dazzling expression of this new level of accessibility was the tumbling travel times. Since the 1820s, when George and Robert Stephenson’s locomotives travelled at 15mph along the first steam-powered public railway between Stockton and Darlington, the pace of train travel had quickened remarkably. By the 1870s, average speeds of 40–50mph and maximum speeds over 70mph were common in Britain, and by the turn of the twentieth century railway travel was quick, comfortable and affordable for most travellers.²⁶ The pace of travel continued to quicken and, in particular, the journey from London to Cornwall became much more convenient after the introduction of the Cornish Riviera Express service in 1904. Between 1883 and 1924, the Great Western Railway reduced the duration of the journey from London Paddington to Penzance from well over nine hours to just six-and-a-half – a record only surpassed after the introduction of high-speed trains in the late 1970s. Over the same period, the journey from Birmingham to Penzance was reduced from just under twelve hours to less than nine, and from Manchester the travel time fell from fifteen hours to twelve.²⁷

The combination of decreasing travel times and an individualistic, competitive railway system fuelled an obsession with speed that proved deadly as the fierce rivalry between the Great Western Railway and the London and South-Western Railway intensified.²⁸ Both companies ran services from London to the south-west, and in the 1890s it seemed that the London and South-Western Railway had the edge because its route to Exeter – one of the calling points on the way to Cornwall – was twenty-two miles shorter and fifteen minutes quicker than their competitor’s.²⁹ In addition, the London and South-Western Railway also provided the quicker service to Plymouth, the ideal starting point from which to begin a tour of Cornwall.³⁰ The competition intensified until 1906, when a London and South-Western Railway service that was running late derailed after the driver failed to reduce speed at Salisbury, killing himself along with twenty-five others. This damaged the company’s reputation – already notorious for running late – and shortly afterwards the Great Western Railway opened a new line between Castle Cary and Langport, unlocking a shorter route to the west. From 1906, the Great Western Railway reorganised its express services to the region, making it both quicker and more punctual than the London and South-Western Railway, and due to a combination of these factors the company posted a twenty-one per cent increase in total traffic between London and the West Country in the period 1904–9.³¹ Already by 1914 the Great Western Railway claimed that their route was ‘the Holiday Line’, and soon their trains were quicker to both Exeter and Plymouth.³² The result, according to Jack Simmons, was that ‘Great Western had won the race’ to the west and, after the Railways Act came into force in 1923, the introduction of the Atlantic Coast Express service from Waterloo did not make the newly formed Southern Railway a serious competitor for the annual tourist traffic, though it provided an alternative route on a glamorous service for travellers bound for north Cornwall.³³

North Wales

Before Thomas Telford’s major civil engineering projects in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, travelling through north Wales was tedious and wearisome, but it was also fraught with risk and danger. In Lives of the Engineers (first published in 1861), Samuel Smiles described the ‘rough, narrow, steep’ roads that were unprotected, mostly unfenced, and were ‘almost impassable’ during the winter months.³⁴ A diary account of the journey between London and Holyhead in 1787 described the arduous four-day expedition, and the mail coaches and stagecoaches were frequently overturned and broke down on the difficult roads.³⁵ In the early nineteenth century, the roads of north Wales became central to the national interest because they formed part of a broader transport network that linked Dublin with London after the Acts of Union (1800). At this time, the Irish mail coach took forty-one hours to get to Holyhead from London, and the mail eventually arrived in Dublin on the third day of travel. In addition to the perilous roads, Irish MPs making the journey to Westminster had to endure the lack of adequate harbours at Dublin and Holyhead, and also needed to navigate the treacherous Menai Strait separating the island of Anglesey from the rest of Wales. The Irish Whig politician Sir Henry Parnell (great-uncle of Stewart Parnell) raised the grievances of his compatriots in parliament, and as a result Thomas Telford was appointed chief engineer and completed his survey of the route in 1811.³⁶ Parnell went on to serve in the Holyhead Roads Committee for the 1815 parliamentary session, and its recommendations were adopted by parliament.³⁷ Much like the Birmingham merchants who provided the impetus for the extension of the railway to London in the hope of tapping new markets, it was Irish MPs who pushed for better transport connections with Westminster, serving as a reminder that the drive for infrastructural expansion came from the provinces as well as from the capital.³⁸

Telford began work on the Shrewsbury to Holyhead section of the new road in 1815, and over the next decade or so the way was transformed. Charles G. Harper described the new route in The Holyhead Road (1902), which passed through the Vale of Conwy, crossed the river at Betws-y-Coed over the Waterloo Bridge (constructed in 1815), through Nant Ffrancon and then on to Bangor and the Menai Strait, which was bridged in 1826. Passing through the ‘wildest scenery’, Telford’s road never exceeded a one in twenty gradient; at 28–34 feet its width made it much safer, and the ‘splendid surface’ made travel much quicker, in an era when stage coaches raced against each other to achieve new feats of distance and speed.³⁹ Telford also worked on the mail road that kept largely to the north coast as it crossed the Conwy Suspension Bridge (constructed in 1826), skirted Penmaenmawr and provided an important link between Liverpool and Dublin. This was an infrastructural project of national importance, and as such a grant of just over £164,489 was made by parliament for work to be undertaken on the road and bridges. The remaining cost of just over £533,474 was provided by a Treasury loan to be repaid from the tolls.⁴⁰

In the following decades, the expansion of railway lines complemented the earlier development of the roads. As was the case in Cornwall, the early trams and rails were associated with industry, such as the Padarn Lake Railway which connected the Dinorwic slate quarry with the port on the Menai Strait from the 1840s, and the Croesor Tramway which transported slate to Porthmadog for shipment from 1864.⁴¹ After decades of construction, extensions and railway amalgamations the region was opened to tourists from the industrial centres of the Midlands and north-west England, who were advised to begin their tour at either Chester or Shrewsbury and end at the other.⁴² From Chester, the route ran along the north Wales coast, passing through the fashionable watering places Rhyl, Colwyn Bay and Llandudno – ‘the Queen of Welsh watering-places’, which by the early twentieth century boasted new electric lighting along the promenade and was home to the Happy Valley pleasure resort.⁴³ Robert Stephenson’s two tubular bridges at Conwy (1848) and the Menai Strait (1850) opened the continuous railway route to Holyhead, which made it easier for tourists to discover the region.⁴⁴ In 1859, the London and North Western Railway absorbed the Chester and Holyhead Railway, and this line became part of a much larger system with convenient links to the cities of the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire and London. The line also connected to a branch that followed the Conwy Valley ‘into the mountain heart of “Wild Wales”’ to inland tourist hotspots such as Betws-y-Coed, which was a convenient headquarters for artists, anglers and those wishing to ascend the famed peaks of the district.⁴⁵ Alternatively, tourists travelled on the popular steamboat services that plied between Liverpool and various places along the north Wales coast.⁴⁶

The second main route entered mid-Wales from Shrewsbury, where the Great Western met the Cambrian Railway at Whitchurch and Welshpool.⁴⁷ The Cambrian line struck westwards across Wales through Newtown and Machynlleth to Dovey Junction, where the west coast branch line called at Aberdyfi, Barmouth, and took in views of Harlech and Criccieth castles on the way to Pwllheli in the north. The Cambrian Coast Express was a popular tourist train that ran between London and Aberystwyth with through coaches to Pwllheli, though the seaside resorts of the west remained far less busy than those well-established watering places along the north coast, which by the early twentieth century were less than two hours away from Liverpool and Manchester on the train.⁴⁸

The transport network of road, rail and steamboats continued to thicken in later decades. The Llandudno and Colwyn Bay electric railway served both the seaside resorts and the growing suburban population,⁴⁹ while branch lines penetrated the heart of the region. New opportunities for loop tours were opened up by extensions between Betws-y-Coed and Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1881, and through Beddgelert from 1922 along the newly formed Welsh Highland Railway.⁵⁰ The Ffestiniog Railway was originally built to connect the slate quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog with Porthmadog, but became very popular with tourists who wanted to take in the mountainous scenery from the so-called ‘Toy Railway’.⁵¹ At the same time, horse-drawn and, later, motor coaches and bicycles were essential for those who wished to explore the mountains or venture down the Llŷn Peninsula towards Aberdaron and Ynys Enlli.⁵² Tourist-specific services emerged with the pleasure steamers that plied along the River Conwy to Trefriw, as well as the ever-popular Snowdon Mountain Railway which opened in 1896, and from 1903 the Great Orme Tramway took tourists up the headland bearing the same name, which towered above Llandudno.⁵³ By the interwar period, specially built tourist motorcoaches sped around the region on exhausting daily itineraries that exceeded 100 miles in length, and competed with the railway for the tourist traffic between Welsh resorts and Midland towns.⁵⁴ As north Wales became increasingly accessible, the growth in tourist traffic bred an atmosphere of optimism for companies such as the Great Western Railway, which hoped that the region would become ‘one of the most popular of our great national pleasure and health-giving districts’.⁵⁵

Western Connacht

In his Guide to the Western Highlands (Connemara) (1869), E. B. Ivatts made it clear that the reader must not expect to find fashionable watering places that might be ‘seen in a carriage in a couple of hours’. There was no seaside resort or spa ‘where old ladies drink chalybeate waters by the gallon’. On the contrary, such was the remoteness of Connemara that ‘three or four friends can easily spend there a fortnight without meeting’.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, despite its comparative remoteness, western Connacht was gradually integrated into the Irish transport network through the growth of the coach, canal and railway infrastructure in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before a final period of government-funded expansion in the decades before 1914. Charles Bianconi’s famous coaches and cars – the ‘Bians’, capable of conveying between four and twenty passengers – travelled between Galway, Clifden and Westport along roads designed by the Scottish engineer Alexander Nimmo, whose roads, harbours and coastal surveys extended the infrastructural connections between Britain and Ireland in the early decades of the union.⁵⁷ On the waterways, the Royal and Grand Canals crossed the central plain of the country from Dublin and connected with the Shannon Navigation system in the west, before passenger traffic declined in the face of competition from the railways. From the 1840s, construction began on the Midland Great Western Railway route from Dublin to the west, and by the beginning of the twentieth century this formed part of the third largest railway system in Ireland, serving towns such as Galway, Sligo, Westport, Athlone and Mullingar.⁵⁸ Galway and Westport were connected by roads that passed through Connemara, and guidebooks recommended tours of this region – which also included excursions to Lough Corrib, the Aran Islands and Achill Island – before returning to Dublin by train.⁵⁹ The ‘Connemara and Achill’ tourist ticket made this particular route a convenient and popular one, but many others chose to make Galway their headquarters for excursions in all directions, or to pass through this central portion of Ireland’s west as part of a broader tour that took in Killarney in the south and Sligo and Donegal to the north.⁶⁰

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the infrastructural development of Ireland became an important part of British government policy, with the aim of bringing agricultural and industrial prosperity to impoverished regions and also as a means of ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’.⁶¹ In 1888 the Michael Davitt Bridge – named after the land reformer – opened across Achill Sound, providing a permanent link to the mainland that, it was hoped, would help to relieve the poverty of the islanders, as well as making visits more convenient for tourists.⁶² Following the Light Railways Acts in 1889 and 1896, a total of 309 miles of tramways and light railways were constructed in western regions, with the government providing eighty-four per cent of the £1.85m cost.⁶³ During his well-publicised tour of Connemara in 1890, Chief Secretary for Ireland (1887–91) Arthur Balfour promised that there would be extensions to the Midland Great Western Railway lines between Galway and Clifden and from Westport to Achill via Mallaranny, both of which opened in 1895 and brought the far west of Ireland into railway communication with cities such as Dublin, Belfast and Cork.⁶⁴ Between 1903 and 1906, the Midland Great Western Railway operated a tourist express service that left Dublin at midday, passed through Galway, and terminated at Clifden at five o’clock.⁶⁵ Murray’s Handbook for Ireland (1902) pronounced that the extensions would be of ‘inestimable service’ for those in search of ‘wild and picturesque scenery’, although some travellers continued to take the jaunting car between Galway and Clifden, preferring to remain on the roads.⁶⁶ No doubt the railway extensions eased the tourist’s journey, but the purported economic benefits for the local communities were not forthcoming. The inland route taken by the Connemara line by-passed the majority of the local population who lived on the coast, and even after decades of being connected to the railway system workers from Achill Island still boarded the steamers at Westport to find seasonal work in Scotland.

Nevertheless, western Connacht was increasingly integrated into the national transport network, and this new level of accessibility led to the ambitious claim, made in Black’s Guide to Ireland (1912), that this region of the Irish west was ‘fast superseding Killarney in popularity’.⁶⁷ But once travellers had reached the west, coaches, cars and roads remained essential. As a new group of road users, cyclists benefited from a series of innovations including wheels of equal size, pneumatic tyres, ball bearings and new frames, all of which improved comfort on the rougher roads. On the west coast, cycling from south to north brought with it the additional support of the prevailing south-west wind, though cyclists were instructed to take care on the quieter country lanes because ‘the horses are unaccustomed to cycles’.⁶⁸ Despite the optimism of guidebooks,⁶⁹ the rough nature of some of the roads made them wholly unsuitable for early motorcars. This was evident when Edward VII and Queen Alexandra visited the region in 1903: with their yacht anchored off Leenaun, they motored to Recess before switching to a horse-drawn carriage for the rocky trip to the local marble quarries.⁷⁰ In the hope of accelerating the development of the nascent tourism industry, the Irish Road Improvement Association was established in 1897, but the entrepreneur and Irish tourism pioneer Frederick W. Crossley remained frustrated at the lack of progress made in the following years, for which he blamed the local authorities.⁷¹ Similarly, the English barrister and travel writer J. Harris Stone felt that the Congested Districts Board should direct funds to ‘solving the transit problem’ in Connemara rather than investing in barrel-making, honey-dealing, and on exhibitions in St Louis, Cork, Paris and Dublin.⁷² In 1912 the Roads Board provided grants to Galway and Sligo county councils to carry out improvements to the roads, but the damage caused during the Irish Civil War (1922–23) and the financial constraints on the Cumann na nGaedheal government limited the extent to which the Irish Tourist Association saw its plans for improvements carried out during the interwar period.⁷³

The extension of travel facilities also brought Ireland into closer contact with Britain. Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast were important points of connection, but the most popular route was the crossing between Holyhead and Dublin. In the summer of 1815 Robert Peel’s passage from Holyhead to Dublin took an exhausting thirty-three hours to complete.⁷⁴ But once adequate harbours had been constructed on both sides of the Irish Sea, and connections established between quick steamboats and the main railway system, travel times between the two islands fell dramatically. Between 1876 and 1897, the duration of the journey from London to Dublin fell from over thirteen hours to less than nine.⁷⁵ The increasing speed of travel along this route was fuelled by the development of compound steam engines that made ships more efficient, and the replacement of paddle wheels with screw propellers. In addition, the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company (which plied to Kingstown) and the London and North Western Railway (to North Wall) urgently updated their fleets as they competed for both passenger traffic and the lucrative Irish Mail contract. In guidebooks, the detailed and often boastful description of the tonnage, length and speed in knots of the two fleets reflected a preoccupation with speed and national prestige. In 1897, the German passenger steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse replaced the British Cunard Line as the fastest steamship to cross the Atlantic,⁷⁶ and it was surely with this feat in mind that R. T. Lang began Black’s Guide to Ireland (1902) with the assurance that, ‘in these days when Germany is claiming the records of the sea, it is good to know that on the mail route we still have the fastest boats sailing from any port’.⁷⁷

The years before 1914 represent the apogee of western Connacht’s connection to the transport network and of Ireland’s integration into the infrastructure of the British-Irish Isles. In the interwar period, the consolidation of the railway companies as Great Southern Railways was followed by a shift in emphasis towards motor travel. Great Southern Railways responded by putting on motorbus services in addition to its trains, and, after taking over the Irish Omnibus Company in 1934, ran the two services in coordination with each other.⁷⁸ However, after partition and the Civil War the roads and railways of the Free State were in a damaged state, and by the end of the 1930s both the Clifden and Achill extensions had been closed, in a period of economic depression and tariff wars with the United Kingdom.

Skye

In the late eighteenth century – the period when Thomas Pennant, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell journeyed to Skye – it took around ten days by coach to get from London to Edinburgh, and an additional week to reach the Highlands of Scotland.⁷⁹ The old military roads, constructed after the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions, were not convenient for civilian use and the Highland population continued to rely on rough tracks through the mountains and glens. This began to change at the start of the nineteenth century. Telford’s survey, published in 1803, was followed by decades of construction and improvements during which hundreds of roads and bridges integrated the Highlands into the Scottish transport network. In addition, after some difficulties in its construction, from mid-century the Caledonian Canal provided a reliable route across the country, from sea to sea. As part of these monumental projects, which were funded by the state, Skye became better connected with Inverness, and new roads were built on the island itself, connecting the principal town of Portree with Dunvegan, Broadford, Kyleakin and the Totternish and Sleat peninsulas. Along these new and improved routes cattle from Skye found markets in England. At the same time, the Fishery Board carried out improvements at harbours including Portree, in the hope that connecting west coast fisheries with the rest of the country would bring economic prosperity to the Highlands and Islands west of the Great Glen, though such benefits never came to pass.⁸⁰

Before the bridge to the Scottish mainland opened in 1995, sooner or later travelling by water was essential for the visitor to Skye. In the early nineteenth century, the development of steamboats brought reliability to sea travel, which was no longer at the mercy of the wind and the tide. The River and Firth of Clyde was a busy centre of early steamboat development, and services soon reached Skye. Only venturing as far as Dunoon in 1812, by the 1820s steamboats plied to Fort William, Tobermory and Skye, to Inverness via the Caledonian Canal, and provided regular services between the cities of Glasgow, Belfast and Liverpool.⁸¹ After competing for and then jointly managing the West Highland routes, two firms – Thomson and MacConnell, and J. Martin and G. and J. Burns – sold their island-hopping vessels to David Hutchinson and Co. in 1851. Further additions to Hutchinson’s fleet included the paddle steamers Cavalier and Mountaineer in 1854, followed by the Clansman and the first of three Ionas in 1855.⁸² The fleet continued to expand with three new screw-steamers called the Clydesdale (1861), the Clansman (1870) and the Claymore (1881), each bigger than the last. By this time David Hutchinson had retired, leaving the company in the name and control of David MacBrayne.⁸³ MacBrayne published official guides on an annual basis, providing the latest information on routes, itineraries and costs for the upcoming tourist season. The firm was praised in Murray’s Handbook for Scotland (1883) for the way its fleet of tourist steamers enabled visitors to navigate the Western Highlands and Islands ‘with perfect ease’.⁸⁴ Steamboats from Glasgow made their way to Oban, which became an important centre for Highland tourism where visitors could choose from among fifteen hotels, as well as lodging houses and temperance accommodation.⁸⁵ According to MacBrayne’s Summer Tours in Scotland (1881), Oban was the ‘Charing Cross of the Highlands’, after which the steamers called at several places on Skye, including Armadale, Isleornsay, Kyleakin, Broadford and Portree.⁸⁶

On land, Skye was gradually approached by railway lines designed to open new markets for the agricultural and fishing industries. Again, the hoped-for economic prosperity never came, but the new lines operated in coordination with steamboat services to make the Hebrides an increasingly accessible option for tourists. Authorised by the West Highland Act (1896), the West Highland Railway was extended from Fort William along the west coast to Mallaig where, with the help of a £30,000 government grant, a pier and breakwater were constructed in 1901. The train from Glasgow took around five hours and forty minutes to reach Mallaig, and during the summer carriages ran from London, connecting with the steamboats that proceeded to Portree.⁸⁷ In the north-east, Inverness became a popular headquarters from which to begin a tour of the west. In 1898, the construction of a new direct main line from Perth significantly reduced journey times, and from 1900 a summer evening express service left London at ten o’clock in the morning, arriving in Inverness half an hour before midnight.⁸⁸ As a base from which to access the Hebrides, Inverness became more convenient after the Highland Railway line was extended from Strome Ferry to Kyle of Lochalsh in 1897, where travellers could board the MacBrayne’s steamboat on its way from Mallaig to Skye, which departed Kyle of Lochalsh at 2.20pm and arrived at Portree later that afternoon.⁸⁹

Once on the island, smaller boats and coaches took visitors to the principal places of interest. Two ‘light’ railway schemes for the island were proposed under the Light Railways Act (1896), but concerns about limited traffic, opposition to the construction costs being part-funded by raising the crofters’ rates, and ultimately a failure to raise enough capital meant that neither project was realised, and so the roads and coastal sea routes remained essential to the tourist.⁹⁰ Skye was prized for its mountains, lochs, castles, rock formations and facilities for shooting – this was far removed from the busy seaside resorts that could be found on the north Wales coast and in southern Cornwall. From the headquarters of Portree, tourists took the road northwards which led to the Storr Rock on the Trotternish peninsula, and guidebooks recommended excursions to the island of Columba on Loch Snizort. At Dunvegan Castle, the seat of the MacLeod, letters from Dr Johnson, Walter Scott and Bonnie Prince Charlie could be seen alongside the mysterious Fairy Flag. From the alternative headquarters of Broadford, popular excursions ran to Loch Scavaig, the ‘magnificent amphitheatre of jagged peaks’, and literary tourists made for neighbouring Loch Coruisk, which is described in Walter Scott’s ‘Lord of the Isles’ (1815).⁹¹ The southern portion of the island was the destination for keen mountaineers, who tested their skills on the ‘bristling crescent ridges’ of the Cuillin peaks such as Sgùrr nan Gillean, Sgùrr Dearg and Sgùrr Alasdair.⁹² The possibility of carrying bicycles onto steamboats and along stretches of moorland paths made cycling a tempting mode of transport on the island, and the arduous 100-mile Isle of Skye route was, according to the assistant editor of Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette, amply repaid by the grandeur of the rugged scenery.⁹³ However, guidebooks warned prospective two-wheeled tourists about the vast distances between inns, the bumpy by-roads, and the strength of the wind, all of which made cycling a strenuous way of seeing Skye.⁹⁴ As in the west of Ireland, motorists were warned about the state of the rougher roads, which could easily ruin expensive tyres, but such risks also formed part of the appeal for the pioneers of early motoring.⁹⁵

The accessibility of Skye was part of the growing tourism industry in the Highlands, where it has been estimated around 10,000 tourists visited annually at the end of the nineteenth century.⁹⁶ Another approximation for 1921 suggests that there were over 7,000 visitors in the Highlands in June that year, even before the holiday season peaked in July and August.⁹⁷ It is probable that only a small number of these Highland tourists passed through Skye at some point. Developments in transport networks can reduce travel time and perceptions of distance only by so much, and Skye remained comparatively remote. But remoteness was a powerful part of the island’s appeal, and as Donald MacKinnon put it in How to See Skye (1937), by the twentieth century tourists enjoyed ‘a considerable choice of routes’, and places formerly accessible to only a few ‘are now within reach of the many’.⁹⁸

Modern tourism in the west

Once the means for accessing the west had been established, it was the duty of publishers, railway and steamboat companies, tourist boards, resort authorities, writers, artists and publicity departments to ensure that the travelling public went westwards. Their publications bear witness to the development of an increasingly interconnected and sophisticated tourism industry, which depended primarily on private enterprise in the period before the Second World War. Even during the interwar years, when tourism programmes in France, Germany and Italy enjoyed generous government investment, the development of British and Irish tourism relied on the initiative of pioneering entrepreneurs such as Frederick W. Crossley, who formed the first Irish Tourist Association in 1895.⁹⁹ In 1938, Minister for Industry and Commerce Seán Lemass admitted that in the Irish Free State the government had ‘hitherto taken little more than a passive interest in tourist development’, and the same was true in the United Kingdom.¹⁰⁰ When a group of hoteliers launched the ‘Come to Britain’ scheme in 1926, the Department of Overseas Trade announced their support for the venture but stopped short of providing any financial assistance. The fiscal reticence of the state was also on display after the establishment of the Travel Association of Great Britain and Ireland in 1929. The Conservative government made a subscription of £5,000 in a show of support, which was a meagre sum by French, German and Italian standards and came with no guarantee of being renewed the following year.¹⁰¹

Nevertheless, the profile of western destinations was raised through a wide range of promotional activities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Railway and steamboat companies cultivated strong links with other key stakeholders in the tourism industry, sharing resources and coordinating promotional campaigns in what amounted to a series of well-funded and sophisticated marketing strategies – practices that are commonly assumed to have developed in the post-1945 period.¹⁰² The London and North Western Railway established the North Wales Advertising Board in 1909, to which local resorts subscribed and pooled funds that were used to promote the region in the growing tourism market.¹⁰³ In terms of investment in advertising, the large railway companies matched some of the leading brands of the day, and as a proportion of passenger receipts the London and North Western Railway and the Great Western Railway spent as much on advertising in the early 1900s as the ‘Big Four’ railway companies did during the interwar period, which is considered the golden age of railway advertising.¹⁰⁴ Railway companies produced postcards, commissioned artists to design posters, and distributed bookmarks to schools and libraries; promotional films were screened in cinemas, and tear-out coupons for guidebooks were placed in newspapers.¹⁰⁵ From the 1890s, the development of halftone processes enabled the mass reproduction of high-quality photographic images with improved clarity and tonal gradation, which enhanced the visual impact of travel books alongside the sketches and illustrations of established pen-and-brush artists.¹⁰⁶ For instance, Paul Henry’s iconic paintings of the Irish landscape were quickly adopted for use in promotional materials. In a London Midland and Scottish Railway poster from the 1920s, a winding track passes between whitewashed thatched cottages, behind which blue mountains rise up to meet the clouds (see Figure 1.1).¹⁰⁷ A similar Henry painting depicting a village on Achill Island was reproduced in colour for the frontispiece of Michael Floyd’s The Face of Ireland (1937). These paintings were typical of Henry’s composition and use of soft light, which was echoed in the photographic arrangement of winding roads, fields surrounded by stone walls, placid lakes, mountains, fishing villages and stone bridges in guidebooks such as the Midland Great Western Railway guide to Connemara.¹⁰⁸

Aided by developments in mass printing, the British and Irish tourism industry was promoted in a rich and varied manner, which brought the destinations of the west to the attention of potential tourists everywhere. This was just as well, because in this period it was commonly assumed that European destinations were more popular than domestic ones. In the cartoon ‘Departing for the Holidays’ published in the Daily Mirror in 1904, John Bull appeals to the crowd of holidaymakers boarding steamers bound for the continent, asking: ‘why not stop in your own country, and see something of its beauties?’¹⁰⁹ In response, destinations in the west were promoted in terms that compared them favourably with places abroad. The Great Western Railway established its own advertising department in the 1880s and drew on the artwork of the Newlyn School and the folklore collections of William Bottrell and Robert Hunt as part of a marketing strategy that advertised Cornwall as an English Mediterranean – warm, exotic and much easier to reach than southern France, northern Africa or Madeira.¹¹⁰ This comparison was made explicit in a company poster of 1908, which depicts the Cornish and Italian peninsulas in mirror image, and claims that ‘There is a great similarity between Cornwall and Italy in shape, climate & natural beauties’.¹¹¹ In 1904, the company published the first edition of its series of booklets that promoted what it called The Cornish Riviera. After selling nearly 250,000 copies and unveiling a new express train with the same name, the preface to the second edition, published in December 1905, declared with confidence that the appellation had been unanimously ratified by the travelling public, and ‘has almost achieved the distinction of becoming a household word’.¹¹² The marketing campaign seemed to work, and the term was adopted by the artist and writer Sidney Heath in The Cornish Riviera (1911), and J. Harris Stone also used the term for his topographical book on England’s Riviera (1912). The commercialisation of the west was far from universally embraced, though, and many objected to the way that Cornwall was softened and made fashionable for tourist consumption. The Cornish novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch declared emphatically that ‘Cornwall is NOT a “Riviera”’ (he preferred ‘the Delectable Duchy’) because three of its four sides were surrounded by the stormy Atlantic, and Cornish historian A. K. Hamilton Jenkin reassured his readers that the coastline remained ‘just as stern and rugged’ as it always was, despite the mildness suggested by the term ‘riviera’.¹¹³

The same strategies were at play in the promotion of north Wales. In the early 1900s the Llandudno Town Improvement Association issued a guidebook with the title Lovely Llandudno, the Cambrian Naples, and a match striker from a London and North Western Railway carriage interior was decorated with an image of the pier and curved bay, reading: ‘Llandudno – “The Naples of the North”’.¹¹⁴ This sobriquet was also used in the titles of promotional films produced in the 1930s, while the London and North Western Railway also likened Cardigan Bay to the Bay of Naples.¹¹⁵ The dominance of the London and North Western Railway along the north Wales coast did not stop the Great Western Railway from promoting the inland portion of the region as the ‘British Tyrol’ due to the combination of lakes, rivers, tree-clad mountains, fountains and valleys that evoked the ‘bracing uplands of Austria and Switzerland’.¹¹⁶ A similar comparison was proposed by Jeanette Marks, an American professor of English literature, who described the mountains as ‘British Alps’, and her compatriot, the photographer W. I. Lincoln Adams, wrote that the Llanberis Pass had been justly called the Chamonix of Wales.¹¹⁷

One of the most prestigious forms of place promotion was the association of western locations with the monarchy. Travel companies, hotels, local development associations and publishers enthusiastically described the routes that tourists could follow in the footsteps of royalty. After Queen Victoria travelled on the firm’s steamers in 1847, David MacBrayne marketed her itinerary from Glasgow to the Highlands as ‘the Royal Route’. This association was reinforced in 1902, when Edward VII and Queen Alexandra cruised through the Highlands in the Royal Yacht, visiting many of the places included on the Royal Route.¹¹⁸ In Ireland, royal patronage had the potential to bring the country to the attention of the British travelling public, considered the principal market for the Irish tourism industry and a promising area of potential economic development. However, uniting Irish landscapes with the monarchy through the designation of royal routes was a contentious strategy because it represented the presence of the British state in Ireland. Nevertheless, the Prince of Wales Route was established after the journey made from Cork to Killarney by the future Edward VII in 1858, and in 1897 the Duke of York Route followed the tour taken by the Duke and Duchess along the River Shannon.¹¹⁹ In 1903, Edward and Alexandra visited Connemara and, according to the director of the Midland Great Western Railway, Joseph Tatlow, were well received by all, ‘whatever their politics, or aspirations’.¹²⁰ The royal party lunched at the Railway Hotel in Recess and Tatlow considered the visit a resounding success, but in the aftermath of the tour his requests on behalf of the company for royal endorsement of the hotel – and to promote what would be designated the ‘Royal Connemara Route’ – were politely declined.¹²¹

Aside from royal endorsement, the western peripheries were more typically promoted through a range of images and associations that were historical, mythical and legendary. MacBrayne’s steamers plied along the Royal Route but they also promised to transport the traveller to ‘the Isles of Youth’, associating the Hebridean islands with the legend of Oisín, who travelled with Niamh to Tír na nÓg – the land of eternal youth.¹²² The suggestive names of the company’s steamers furnished the tourist’s journey with a distinctive atmosphere: the Columba and Iona called forth Celtic Christianity; the Clansman, Claymore, Chieftain, Fusilier, Grenadier and Cavalier evoked the popular, bloody and glamorised histories of clan feuds, the Civil Wars and Jacobite rebellions; while the Mountaineer, Gael and Fingal suggested a voyage of adventure into a mountainous Gaelic periphery steeped in mythology.¹²³ Such associations were reinforced in the rich imagery that adorned guidebooks. The artwork on the front cover of MacBrayne’s official tourist pamphlet for 1938 is particularly arresting: a Highland warrior wearing a red tartan kilt and surrounded by fellow soldiers stands powerfully on an elevated rock and thrusts a basket-hilted claymore into the sky, while holding a targe with the other arm and gazing defiantly beyond the page.¹²⁴ The other warriors, in kilts and Balmoral bonnets, are standard-bearers holding aloft the Red Ensign, the Scottish Saltire, the Royal Banner of Scotland and two David MacBrayne banners. In striking shades of yellow, the background depicts rugged mountains rising from the calm surface of the water, on which a MacBrayne steamer continues on its voyage. A tartan border surrounds this remarkable image, and underneath the bold lettering implores the onlooker to ‘See This Scotland First’.¹²⁵

Similarly, the Cornish passenger steamer SS Lyonesse plied from Penzance to the Scilly Isles and the vessel was aptly named, for it sailed over Lyonesse, the sunken land of Arthurian legend, to the islands that were supposedly once ‘the peaks of the submerged realm’.¹²⁶ The Great Western Railway’s Bulldog Class locomotives also evoked Arthurian legend with names such as Sir Lancelot, Tintagel, Armorel, Avalon, Camelot, Lyonesse and Pendragon, and in the 1920s the Southern Railway publicity department followed suit with its N15 express passenger locomotives, which were named after Arthur’s knights, Lyonnesse (alternatively spelt), Excalibur, The Green Knight, and became known as the ‘King Arthur’ Class.¹²⁷

Some legendary associations of the landscape were, however, fabrications that were invented with the tourist firmly in mind. In Wales, Burrow’s Guide (c.1923) told of how, in the late eighteenth century, the ‘enterprising innkeeper’ of the Royal Goat Hotel in Beddgelert built up a cairn in the adjoining meadow and claimed that it was the grave of Gelert – the faithful hound that was wrongfully slain by Prince Llywelyn after a tragic misunderstanding.¹²⁸ Gelert, covered in blood, was thought to have killed Llywelyn’s son and heir, but it was only after killing his dog that Llywelyn realised Gelert had in fact protected the baby from a wolf. The emotive story, combined with the creativity of the innkeeper, made for a tourist hotspot, and in the early twentieth century it was thought that most visitors to the grave still believed the tale.¹²⁹

Marketing western places as desirable destinations was underpinned by detailed itineraries, descriptive passages, advertisements and timetables that explained how the tourist’s experience would be shaped by a wide range of well-coordinated services. From the 1840s until the early twentieth century, Railway Clearing House made possible the purchase of ‘through’ tickets by distributing the income from passenger receipts to the appropriate railway companies, allowing passengers to travel seamlessly across a competitive system.¹³⁰ At the same time, travel agencies performed a crucial logistical role in the organisation of tours. By the late nineteenth century, agents issued combination tickets that were valid across multiple transport services along with coupons for accommodation, while their local offices arranged appropriate excursions for the incoming tourists, in what was an early form of package holiday.¹³¹ This service grew in importance as leisure travel became increasingly within reach for less affluent social groups, because it allowed tourists working to stricter budgets to accurately calculate the overall cost of a holiday in advance.¹³² Railway and steamboat companies either worked alongside travel agents or adopted similar practices and forged their own links in the creation of ‘Tourist Programmes’. For instance, in the forty-eight-page Tourist Programme for 1903, MacBrayne’s provided detailed information about its array of tours that combined rail, coach and steamer travel and ran in connection with trains and steamers arriving into Glasgow, Fort William, Oban and Inverness from all corners of the British-Irish Isles. On tours ranging from day or weekend excursions to more leisurely cruises, MacBrayne’s allowed tourists to break their journey so that they could, for instance, take the special summer excursion steamer from Mallaig to Skye, for the purpose of visiting Loch Scavaig and Loch Coruisk.¹³³ The flexibility of this system is reflected in the range of tickets available, from single and return fares to the sixty-shilling Weekly Ticket that allowed for six days of consecutive pleasure sailing, and Tourist Tickets that remained valid for six months after purchase.¹³⁴ Similar provisions could be found in north Wales, where Tourist Tickets allowed for breaks in the journey at places of interest, and weekly or fortnightly Holiday Contract Tickets permitted travel on the London and North Western Railway’s trains as well as the boats of the Liverpool and North Wales Steamship Company.¹³⁵

Even in the less-frequented regions of the west, facilities for the tourist became more dependable. From the 1890s, travellers boarded the Galway Steamboat Company’s vessel the SS Dun Aengus for a day trip to the Aran Islands, whereas previously they were advised to seek passage in the fishing boats or to hire a boat themselves.¹³⁶ The steamer provided regular contact with the mainland for the islanders, and it was on this service that J. M. Synge left Galway for Inis Mór in an atmospheric shroud of mist.¹³⁷ Timetables, with their itineraries, tourist services, lists of calling points and formulaic layout, suggest at first glance that travelling became more regulated, bureaucratic and predictable – in other words, more modern. However, as any traveller will verify, the timetable implies a level of inviolable surety that is not always fulfilled. Even scheduled services that catered for the lucrative tourist crowd were subject to human impulse, as the Irish essayist and journalist Robert Lynd found out when he attempted to take the Lough Corrib Steamboat Company service from Galway to Cong. Like any well-prepared traveller, Lynd consulted the guidebooks and timetables in advance, but on arriving at the landing stage for the scheduled three-o’clock boat, he was informed that there would be no service that day because the captain was away at the races. Incredulous, Lynd waited a while to no avail, and was dismayed that ‘no public announcement of this earth-shaking change had been made in the time-table of the Cong steamer’.¹³⁸

Aided by the Joint Stock Companies Act (1844) and limited liability legislation in the 1850s, British and Irish railway companies began to diversify their range of operations and made efforts to achieve, as L. M. McCraith put it, ‘the absolute monopoly over tourists’ expenditure’.¹³⁹ The London and North Western Railway began to provide combined rail and road tickets for the north Wales region, while the Great Western Railway opened a hotel at Tregenna Castle in 1878, and established its own bus services in Cornwall from 1903.¹⁴⁰ In Ireland, the public and mail car services between Clifden and Westport were superseded by the Midland Great Western Railway’s own motor coach services, and the company opened railway hotels at Galway, Mallaranny and Recess.¹⁴¹ By 1913 there were 112 railway hotels in the United Kingdom,¹⁴² which provided lodgings alongside a wide variety of commercial hotels, family hotels and rural inns. As leisure travel became increasingly affordable hotels and inns were supplemented by hostels, which proliferated in the interwar period. After forming in 1929 and establishing seven hostels across north Wales, the Merseyside Youth Hostel Association (YHA) quickly expanded into a national body, and by 1932 there were 150 hostels available to its membership of 20,000.¹⁴³ The Scottish Youth Hostels Association also grew rapidly, amassing 57 hostels and nearly 39,000 members by 1944. A cluster of hostels opened in the north-western Highlands of Scotland, including at Kyle of Lochalsh, Ullapool, Loch Gairloch and the rather basic hostel at Uig on Skye.¹⁴⁴

Guidebooks described how the proliferation of hotels, inns and boarding houses turned quiet seaside villages into lively centres for excursions, and the rapid pace of development had the ability to turn the natural advantages of beaches and cliffs into ‘local profit’, but also brought with it the risk of spoiling rural areas by ‘the ravages of the builder’.¹⁴⁵ Hotels eagerly publicised the investments that had been made to expand their facilities so that visitors could replicate elite leisure pursuits at affordable prices.¹⁴⁶ In addition to lodgings and food, Mongan’s Hotel in Carna, County Galway, provided guides, boats, and was situated in a landscape well suited to hunting, shooting and angling.¹⁴⁷ On Lough Corrib, fishing parties occupied the cottage on Inishshanboe Island during the summer, while the Leenaun Hotel – situated in the solitudes of Connemara – provided fishing rights in nearby streams and lochs, and access to 10,000 acres of shooting stocked with grouse, hares and snipe.¹⁴⁸ In western Wales, establishments such as Hendre Hall in Barmouth and the Prince of Wales Hotel in Caernarfon drew attention to the recent redecoration and enlargement of their rooms, as well as sea and mountain views, and facilities for popular pastimes such as golf and tennis.¹⁴⁹ Cobden’s Hotel, situated in Capel Curig on the banks of the Llugwy River, advertised the trout and salmon fishing to be had in the surrounding lakes and rivers, and guests had access to a private lake stocked with five-year-old rainbow trout as well as 15,000 ‘strictly preserved and reserved’ acres of shooting for grouse, pheasant and woodcock.¹⁵⁰

However, for all their bold lettering and enticing offers, advertisements for hotels in Connemara and Skye did not disclose the history of evictions, famine, clearances and emigration that produced the vast empty moorlands and hill country so highly valued by anglers and hunters. In her account of travelling in the Hebrides, the Scottish writer Constance Gordon-Cumming quoted at length evidence given to the Napier Commission (1883), which was tasked with investigating the conditions of the crofters in the Highlands. The collected testimonies revealed that four Skye townships were cleared ‘to make room for the deer’. Moreover, the crofters were prohibited from keeping dogs, which meant that sheep from the large farms strayed unchecked onto their pasture, and their crops were eaten by the deer.¹⁵¹ Six years later, the American couple Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell saw just one man fishing and another shooting as they travelled south from Dunvegan through miles of Skye moorland that had been cleared of its inhabitants for the sake of ‘a fortnight’s amusement’ for a handful of wealthy visitors.¹⁵² From 1882, the crofters of Skye responded with a series of disturbances known as the Crofters’ War, which took the form of rent strikes, the destruction of fences, the occupation of farms and the mutilation or killing of livestock – events which, it seems, did not deter tourists from visiting the island in the 1880s.¹⁵³ The Glendale shoots were unable to proceed that season, and the government sent troops to defend the rent-collecting and eviction-serving sheriffs, as the crofters protested the system of land tenure that gradually began to change after the Crofters Holdings Act (1886).

The land question collided with tourism in Connacht, too. After the Land War broke out in 1879, the Land League’s agrarian agitation took similar forms to that in Skye, including no-rent campaigns, the targeting of livestock and boycotting. Travellers to the region described episodes of agitation such as the riots at Kilvine, Carraroe and Maam, and explained that land agents went about their business ‘guarded by two policemen armed with double-barrelled guns loaded with slugs’.¹⁵⁴ The Scottish lawyer and writer Alexander Innes Shand suggested that the agitation deterred tourists from the region,¹⁵⁵ but for the landowner Mrs C. J. Blake the tourist traffic offered a means of fighting back against the Land League, after her 400-acre farm was boycotted. Mrs Blake’s situation achieved notoriety and in 1881 parliament heard conflicting statements concerning the wellbeing of the tenants on the estate. After receiving financial support from the Blake Fund Committee (to which Arthur Balfour subscribed), in 1883 Mrs Blake opened the family house as the Renvyle House Hotel, which hosted the authors Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (Violet Martin) during their journey Through Connemara in a Governess Cart (1893).¹⁵⁶

Conclusion

In this chapter, the historical sketch of transport infrastructure and the tourism industry reveals how different forms and degrees of mobility intersected in the west: artists and writers seeking material for cultural revival sat on steamers alongside islanders returning from the mainland markets; Irish MPs attending parliamentary sessions at Westminster were conveyed along the same routes as the mail; tourists escaping city life for Connemara or Skye were joined by soldiers and police during outbreaks of agrarian agitation; journalists, commissioners and self-appointed amateur social investigators collected evidence from locals for interested readers; and host populations responded to the mobility of others by providing accommodation, acting as guides, traversing the local road networks and shaping the experiences of visitors. By the late nineteenth century, travelling to the farthest reaches of the west was no longer so protracted or dangerous, but increasing accessibility unfolded as a series of uneven developments – Skye and western Connacht remained less frequented by visitors than the seaside resorts of north Wales or the coastal towns of Cornwall. But across the west, guidebooks and travel books exhibited a clear awareness of time-space compression, and marvelled at the changes that had taken place since the days of Thomas Pennant and Dr Johnson.¹⁵⁷

Infrastructural transformation was not confined to the western areas of the British-Irish Isles, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it seemed that the world was being remade by technologies that defied space. Railway lines multiplied in Germany, France and Russia, creating new connections between European nations, and great distances were overcome by the first transcontinental railroad in the United States (1869), the Canadian Pacific Line (1886) and the Trans-Siberian Railway (1904). Distant landmasses were connected by ever-quickening steamboats and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), while telegraph and telephone wires increased the range and immediacy of global communication. That these developments were inextricably linked to the rapid expansion of colonialism is conveyed by Cecil Rhodes’s unrealised ambition to build a continuous railway line over the African continent from Cape Town to Cairo. Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) was a fictional account of a global form of travel that also took place in real life. By the 1870s paying customers could take Thomas Cook’s tour ‘Round the World, by Steam’ and in 1890 the American journalist Nellie Bly achieved the feat in just 72 days.¹⁵⁸ All of these transformations created the sense that, as H. G. Wells put it, ‘the world grows smaller and smaller’ and that national borders were becoming obsolete.¹⁵⁹

But at the same time as empires and trade networks were expanding, the territory of the state was consolidated by the very same infrastructure of roads, railways and maritime steam power, as well as by school systems, the postal service, mass-circulation newspapers and bureaucracies that were organised along national lines.¹⁶⁰ In the USA, the Frontier Myth represented a quite distinctive case of how the territorial consolidation of the west was freighted with symbolic and ideological power that shaped the national consciousness.¹⁶¹ To the late nineteenth-century readers and travellers in the British-Irish Isles, Skye, the highlands of western Connacht, the mountains of north Wales and the cliffscapes of western Cornwall were no longer a collection of distant and unfamiliar peripheries. They were made accessible through a combination of large infrastructural projects, the coordination of transport services, a growing number of accommodation providers, and promotional campaigns that exploited emerging printing techniques, royal endorsement, and deep associations between the places of the west and historical events, myths and legends. The remaining chapters in this book examine how western landscapes, now within both physical and imaginative reach, became the subject of a ‘westward gaze’ that shaped British and Irish history.

Notes

1. 1. J. Simmons, ‘Railways, Hotels, and Tourism in Great Britain 1839–1914’, Journal of Contemporary History, 19 (1984), 201–22, at 213–15. The aphorism relating to Skye was attributed to Dean Stanley, in A. R. H. Moncrieff and W. Smith Jr., The Highlands and Islands of Scotland (London, 1907), 17.

2. 2. J. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. P. Camiller (Princeton, NJ, 2014), 712.

3. 3. E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA, 1976), x, 203–6.

4. 4. C. Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, NJ, 1993).

5. 5. J. Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA, 2012).

6. 6. J. Simmons, The Railways of Britain (London, 1986), 12–26.

7. 7. J. Moore, ‘The “Last Railway Mania”: The Light Railways Act of 1896 and Local Railway Construction in Britain’, Journal of Transport History 41, no. 2 (2020), 229–53, at 229–33. Instead of the costly and time-consuming process of authorising railway lines by acts of parliament, proposals for light railway lines were considered by the Light Railway Commissioners and the final decision rested with the Board of Trade.

8. 8. P. Bosley, Light Railways in England and Wales (Manchester, 1990), 2–3, 7, 65.

9. 9. Robbins, Nineteenth-century Britain, 27–8.

10. 10. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2006 [1983]), 42–6; J. M. Mackenzie, ‘Empires of Travel: British Guide Books and Cultural Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, in Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity and Conflict, ed. J. K. Walton (Clevedon, 2005), 19–38, at 21.

11. 11. For the model of core and periphery, see Hechter, Internal Colonialism.

12. 12. D. Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin, 2008), 1–6; for a discussion of how this perspective has shaped the dominant narratives of British and Irish history, see Gange, Frayed Atlantic Edge, 339–47; for railways and the development of infrastructures of circulation in a colonial context, see M. Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004), 48–9, 61–2.

13. 13. Beatty, ‘Gaelic League’, 58–9; A. Bourke, ‘Re-imagining the Gaeltacht: Maps, Stories, and Places in the Mind’, in Re-imagining Ireland, ed. A. H. Wyndham (Charlottesville, 2006), 82–98, at 84–6.

14. 14. C. Harvie, A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture, and Technology on Britain’s Atlantic Coast, 1860–1930 (Oxford, 2008); K. Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993), 246–51.

15. 15. David Edgerton argues that histories of technology are innovation-centric, and neglect the continued significance of older technologies: D. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London, 2008), ix–xviii.

16. 16. J. K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750–1914 (Leicester, 1983), 20–23.

17. 17. A. Durie, Scotland and Tourism: The Long View, 1700–2015 (London, 2017), 28.

18. 18. V. L. Whitechurch, ‘The West Cornwall Railway’, The Railway Magazine 4 (1899), 162–9, at 162–3.

19. 19. Whitechurch, ‘The West Cornwall Railway’, 164.

20. 20. J. Vernon, ‘Border Crossings: Cornwall and the English (Imagi)nation’, in Imagining Nations, ed. G. Cubitt (Manchester, 1998), 153–72, at 163; M. Ireland, ‘Land’s End, Cornwall, England’, in The Tourism Imaginary and Pilgrimages to the Edges of the World, ed. N. Herrero and S. Roseman (Bristol, 2015), 62–91, at 84.

21. 21. Great Western Railway [GWR], Cornish Riviera (1905), 51; Whitechurch, ‘West Cornwall Railway’ (1899), 167–8.

22. 22. Murray’s Handbook for Cornwall, 9th edn (1879), introduction, 10.

23. 23. Simmons, ‘Railways, Hotels’, 214–15.

24. 24. Bosley, Light Railways, 65.

25. 25. C. S. Ward, Thorough Guide Series. North Devon and North Cornwall (London, 1883), 15–16.

26. 26. E. Zuelow, A History of Modern Tourism (London, 2016), 52; T. Croal, A Book About Travelling Past and Present (London and Edinburgh, 1877), 583–4.

27. 27. Ward, North Devon and North Cornwall (1883), 8, 10; C. S. Ward and M. J. B. Baddeley, Thorough Guide Series. South Devon and South Cornwall, 9th edn (London, 1924), p. 16.

28. 28. Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 109–30.

29. 29. Ward and Baddeley, South Devon and South Cornwall (1884), 1.

30. 30. J. Simmons, ‘South-Western v. Great Western: Railway Competition in Devon and Cornwall’, The Journal of Transport History 4, no. 1 (1959), 13–34, at 34.

31. 31. ‘South-Western Boat Train Wrecked’, The Times, 2 July 1906, 6; Simmons, ‘South-Western v. Great Western’, 28–30.

32. 32. The Great Western Railway, The Cornish Riviera: Our National Health and Pleasure Resort, 4th edn (London, 1914), 5, 113; Ward and Baddeley, South Devon and South Cornwall (1924), 15–16.

33. 33. Simmons, ‘South-Western v. Great Western’, 30–33.

34. 34. S. Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, vol. 3, History of Roads; Metcalfe; Telford, rev. ed. (London, 1874), 253.

35. 35. Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, vol. 3, 252–5n.

36. 36. C. G. Harper, The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin, vol. 1, London to Birmingham (London, 1902), 18–20.

37. 37. M. Hughes, ‘Telford, Parnell, and the Great Irish Road’, The Journal of Transport History 6, no. 4 (1964), 199–209, at 199.

38. 38. Harper, Holyhead Road, 21–2, 34–5.

39. 39. Harper, Holyhead Road, 20–22.

40. 40. Figures taken from the Parliamentary Return (1839), quoted in Harper, Holyhead Road (1902), 21–2. By 1839, over £250,880 had been repaid.

41. 41. P. Johnson, The Welsh Narrow-Gauge Railways (Weybridge, 1985).

42. 42. The railway networks linked this region with urban centres in England more so than with those in south Wales; see Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, 8; K. Jones, C. Tully, and H. Williams, ‘Travel Writing and Wales’, Studies in Travel Writing 18, no. 2 (2014), 101–6, at 101–2.

43. 43. The London and North Western Railway [LNWR], Tourist Guide to North Wales (London, 1909), 59–60.

44. 44. Walton, English Seaside Resort, 22.

45. 45. Quotation from Eyre-Todd, Through England and Scotland (1903), 81; Ward and Lock’s (Late Shaw’s) Illustrated Guide to, and Popular History of North Wales (London, 1883), 24–5; LNWR, North Wales (1909), 70–73.

46. 46. LNWR, North Wales (1909), 153. The service was operated by the Liverpool and North Wales Steamship Company from the 1890s, when it took over the Liverpool, Llandudno and Welsh Coast Steamboat Company.

47. 47. Cambrian Railways formed in the 1860s as an amalgamation of existing railways, including the Newtown and Machynlleth line and the Aberystwith [sic] and Welsh Coast Railway. In 1922, Cambrian Railways amalgamated with the Great Western Railway.

48. 48. LNWR, North Wales (1909), 56; J. K. Walton, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2000), 28–30.

49. 49. Moore, ‘Light Railways Act’, 243.

50. 50. ‘Blaenau Festiniog’, North Wales Express, 1 April 1881, 5; The London and North Western Railway, Tours in North, South and Central Wales, the English Lake District, Leamington, Buxton, and the Isle of Man (1899) 27; A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Llandudno and North Wales (Northern Section), 9th edn (London, 1925), x.

51. 51. A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to North Wales (Southern Section), 4th edn (London, 1912), 122–3. The anglicised spelling of Ffestiniog as ‘Festiniog’ was used in the 1832 Act of Incorporation.

52. 52. Bardsey Island.

53. 53. Despite a disaster on the opening day, when a locomotive was lost down the mountainside and one man died, the Snowdon Mountain Railway was popular with tourists when it reopened with additional safety measures the following year.

54. 54. Llandudno and North Wales (Northern) (1925), 28–9, 35.

55. 55. The Great Western Railway, North Wales: The British Tyrol (London, 1906), viii.

56. 56. E. B. Ivatts, Guide to the Western Highlands (Connemara) (Dublin, 1869), n.p.

57. 57. M. J. O’Connell, Charles Bianconi: A Biography 1786–1875 (London, 1878), 74–5, 89–92; A. Pilz, ‘Great Works: Archipelagic Romanticisms on the Connemara Coast’, Coastal Studies and Society 2, No. 1 (2023), 82–111.

58. 58. J. Tatlow, Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1920), 116.

59. 59. R. T. Lang, Black’s Guide to Ireland, 24th edn (1906), 215–33.

60. 60. J. Cooke, ed., Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Ireland, 6th edn (London, 1906), advertiser, 4; Midland Great Western Railway of Ireland, Galway, Connemara, Achill, and the West of Ireland (Dublin, 1896), viii–ix.

61. 61. Conservative politician Gerald Balfour (Chief Secretary for Ireland, 1895–1900) made this comment after the 1895 general election. For a detailed account of changes in government policy towards Ireland, see K. T. Hoppen, Governing Hibernia: British Politicians and Ireland 1800–1921 (Oxford, 2016).

62. 62. A. J. Hayes, ‘A Holiday in the Far West. Achill Island’, The Leisure Hour, xliii (1894), 636–40, at 637.

63. 63. Hoppen, Governing Hibernia, 274–5.

64. 64. For an account of Balfour’s tour, see Mr Balfour’s Tours in Connemara and Donegal, by the Special Commissioner of the Daily Express (Dublin, 1890).

65. 65. K. O’Connor, Ironing the Land: The Coming of the Railways in Ireland (Dublin, 1999), 90.

66. 66. J. Cooke, ed., Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Ireland, 6th edn (London, 1902), introduction, 9; C. M. Taylor Jr., The British Isles through an Opera Glass (Philadelphia, 1899), 150.

67. 67. Black’s Guide to Ireland, 8th edn (London, 1912), x.

68. 68. Cooke, ed., Murray’s Ireland (1902), introduction, 12.

69. 69. Cooke, ed., Murray’s Ireland (1906), introduction, 13.

70. 70. Tatlow, Railway Life, 173–4.

71. 71. I. Furlong, Irish Tourism 1880–1980 (Dublin, 2009), 25, 31–3.

72. 72. J. H. Stone, Connemara and the Neighbouring Spots of Beauty and Interest (London, 1906), 74.

73. 73. Furlong, Irish Tourism, 33–4; E. Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse, NY, 2009), 192–3.

74. 74. Hoppen, Governing Hibernia, 42.

75. 75. W. Steel, The History of the London and North Western Railway (London, 1914), 364, 450.

76. 76. Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 109–10.

77. 77. R. T. Lang, ed., Black’s Guide to Ireland, 5th edn (London, 1902), v–vi.

78. 78. T. Ferris, Irish Railways: A New History (Dublin, 2008), 176–7.

79. 79. P. Hulme and T. Youngs, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. P. Hulme and T. Youngs (Cambridge, 2002), 1–14, at 6.

80. 80. Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, 190–205, 217, 234–5.

81. 81. J. Kennedy, The History of Steam Navigation (Liverpool, 1903), 275.

82. 82. The first two Ionas were sold to the Confederate States in the 1860s, but never made it across the Atlantic to join efforts to evade the Union blockade during the US Civil War.

83. 83. Kennedy, History of Steam Navigation, 275–81.

84. 84. Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Scotland, 5th edn (Edinburgh, 1883), introduction, 12.

85. 85. R. W. Butler, ‘Evolution of Tourism in the Scottish Highlands’, Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 3 (1985), 371–91, at 381.

86. 86. David MacBrayne, Official Guide. Summer Tours in Scotland. Glasgow to the Highlands (Glasgow, 1881), 1, 20.

87. 87. D. T. Timins, ‘The Mallaig Extension of the West Highland Railway’, The Railway Magazine 8 (1901), 400–10, passim; A. Newlands, The Scottish Railways: A Sketch of Their Growth and Recent Developments (London, 1921), 17–18; G. Dow, The Story of the West Highland, rev. edn (Northern Books: 2001 [1944]), 12–13, 15.

88. 88. H. A. Vallance, The Highland Railway, 5th extended edn, extra material by C. R. Clinker and A. J. Lambert (Isle of Colonsay, 1996 [1938]), 86–7.

89. 89. David MacBrayne, Summer Tours in Scotland. Glasgow and the Highlands (Glasgow, 1903), ‘Time Table and Tourist Programme’, 7, 28, 40.

90. 90. Vallance, Highland Railway, 61–3.

91. 91. J. D. Mackie and T. M. Finlay, The Complete Scotland: A Comprehensive Survey, Based on the Principal Motor, Walking, Railway and Steamer Routes (London, 1933), 246.

92. 92. H. Batsford and C. Fry, The Face of Scotland, 2nd edn (London, 1934 [1933]), 37–8.

93. 93. Black’s Guide to Scotland, 15th edn (London, 1920), 150.

94. 94. F. Muirhead, ed., The Blue Guides: Scotland (London, 1927), xlviii; Black’s Scotland (1920), 142.

95. 95. Black’s Guide to Scotland, 33rd edn (London, 1903), 552; Black’s Scotland (1920), 152; J. R. Gold and M. M. Gold, Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism since 1750 (Aldershot, 1995), 124–5.

96. 96. C. Smout, ‘Tours in the Scottish Highlands from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, Northern Scotland 5 (1983), 99–121, at 120, quoted in K. Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia (Abingdon, 2017), 49.

97. 97. Butler, ‘Evolution of Tourism’, 387–8.

98. 98. MacKinnon, How to See Skye (1937), 14.

99. 99. Zuelow, Modern Tourism, 144–5; Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish, xx–xxi; D. J. Wilson, ‘The Tourist Movement in Ireland’, Journal of Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, xi (1901), 56–63, passim.

100. 100. Furlong, Irish Tourism, 60.

101. 101. The government subscription was discussed in parliament, 22 April 1929, accessed 1 February 2025, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1929-04-22/debates/e16547e8-5e6b-4684-a1fe-a06351bcc1b1/TravelAssociation(GovernmentSubscription); for figures on government investment in Germany and Italy, see Zuelow, Modern Tourism, 144–5.

102. 102. A. Medcalf, ‘ “We Are Always Learning”: Marketing the Great Western Railway, 1921–39’, The Journal of Transport History 33, no. 2 (2012), 186–211, at 187.

103. 103. D. A. Turner, ‘ “Delectable North Wales” and Stakeholders: The London and North Western Railway’s Marketing of North Wales, c.1904–1914’, Enterprise and Society 19, no. 4 (2018), 894–902.

104. 104. Hiroki Shin, ‘The Art of Advertising Railways: Organisation and Coordination in Britain’s Railway Marketing, 1860–1910’, Business History 45, no. 2 (2014), 187–213, at 201–2; Turner, ‘Marketing North Wales’, 870.

105. 105. Turner, ‘Marketing North Wales’, 871, 885, 890–2. LNWR’s 1909 advertising campaign resulted in over 80,000 requests for guidebooks.

106. 106. E. H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture 1884–1929 (Baltimore, 2005), 162–3.

107. 107. ‘Connemara by Paul Henry’ c.1925 [London Midland and Scottish Railway poster], accessed 1 February 2025, https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co228157/connemara-poster.

108. 108. The Midland Great Western Railway of Ireland, Connemara: The Famed Holiday Resort amid the Western Irish Highlands (Dublin, n.d. [c.1922]), passim.

109. 109. W. K. Haselden, ‘Departing for the Holidays’, Daily Mirror, 1 July 1904, British Cartoon Archive, accessed 1 February 2025, https://archive.cartoons.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=WH0025&pos=22.

110. 110. S. Trower, ‘On the Cliff Edge of England: Tourism and Imperial Gothic in Cornwall’, Victorian Literature and Culture 40, no. 1 (2012), 199–214, at 201; GWR, Cornish Riviera (1905), 6.

111. 111. ‘See Your Own Country First’, 1908 [Great Western Railway poster], accessed 17 July 2025, https://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10701932&itemw=4&itemf=0001&itemstep=1&itemx=1. The two women depicted in the centre, wearing the traditional costumes of the respective peninsulas and gazing directly at the viewer, indicate the sexist overtones of the term ‘natural beauties’.

112. 112. GWR, Cornish Riviera (1905), 5–6; for the sales figures, see GWR, Cornish Riviera (1914), 5.

113. 113. A. Quiller-Couch, ‘Introduction to Cornish Section’, in Burrow’s Guide to Devon and Cornwall (Cheltenham, 1921), 101–7, at 105; A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, Cornwall and the Cornish (1933), reprinted in A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, Cornwall and Its People (London, 1948), 124–315, at 124.

114. 114. A. G. Moy, Lovely Llandudno, the Cambrian Naples (Llandudno, n.d. [c.1910]); the London and North Western Railway, enamel pictorial matchstriker depicting Llandudno, n.d., accessed 1 February 2025, https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co206156/matchstriker-london-north-western-railway-matchstriker.

115. 115. ‘Naples of the North – Llandudno Pathé Pictorial No. 689’, 1931 [film], accessed 1 February 2025, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-naples-of-the-north-llandudno-pathe-pictorial-no-689-1931-online; Llandudno Town Hall Publicity Department, ‘Llandudno “The Naples of the North”’, 1938 [film], accessed 1 February 2025, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-llandudno-the-naples-of-the-north-1938-online; The London and North Western Railway, Tourist Guide to North Wales (London, 1908), 144.

116. 116. GWR, British Tyrol (1906), v–vii.

117. 117. J. Marks, Gallant Little Wales: Sketches of Its People, Places and Customs (Boston, MA, 1912), vii–viii; W. Adams, Photographing in Old England, with Some Snap Shots in Scotland and Wales (New York, 1910), 57.

118. 118. MacBrayne, Summer Tours in Scotland (1903), n.p., see frontmatter.

119. 119. For a detailed discussion of the 1897 visit, see K. J. James, ‘Imprinting the Crown on Irish Holiday-Ground: Marking and Marketing the Duke of York Route 1897’, in Royal Tourism: Excursions around Monarchy, ed. P. Long and N. J. Palmer (Bristol, 2008), 62–79.

120. 120. Tatlow, Railway Life, 173. For an account of how royal visits polarised opinion within the nationalist community, see S. Pašeta, ‘Nationalist Responses to Two Royal Visits to Ireland, 1900 and 1903’, Irish Historical Studies 31, no. 124 (1999), 488–504.

121. 121. James, ‘Imprinting the Crown’, 64. The request was endorsed by the Anglo-Irish political and agricultural reformer, Horace Plunkett.

122. 122. MacBrayne, Royal Route (1938), see front cover and 2–3.

123. 123. David MacBrayne, The Royal Route. Summer Tours in the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Glasgow, 1911), facing 180.

124. 124. The basket-hilted claymore (sword) and the targe (shield) are traditional Highland weapons.

125. 125. MacBrayne, Royal Route (1938), see front cover.

126. 126. GWR, Cornish Riviera (1905), 69.

127. 127. For a full list of Great Western Railway Bulldog Class locomotive names, see: http://www.greatwestern.org.uk/m_in_440_bulldog1.htm [accessed 1 February 2025].

128. 128. P. J. Piggott, ed., Burrow’s Guide to North Wales (Cheltenham, n.d. [c.1923]), 49. The invention of this tradition is discussed in P. Morgan, ‘From Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), 43–100, at 86–7.

129. 129. LNWR, North Wales (1908), 123.

130. 130. Shin, ‘Advertising Railways’, 190.

131. 131. Simmons, ‘Railways, Hotels’, 209; L. Tissot, ‘How Did the British Conquer Switzerland? Guidebooks, Railways, Travel Agencies, 1850–1914’, The Journal of Transport History 16, no. 1 (1995), 21–54, at 36–8; Zuelow, Modern Tourism, 62–3.

132. 132. Furlong, Irish Tourism, 31–2.

133. 133. MacBrayne, Summer Tours (1903), ‘Time Table and Tourist Programme’, 10.

134. 134. MacBrayne, Summer Tours (1903), ‘Time Table and Tourist Programme’, 1–48.

135. 135. LNWR, North Wales (1908), 2–5.

136. 136. G. Shaw, ed., The Official Tourists’ Picturesque Guide to the London and North Western Railway (London, 1875), 146; Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), pink pages, v; the journey on the summer steamer took about three hours, and tourists had three hours to explore the islands before the boat returned to Galway.

137. 137. J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands (Dublin, 1907), 1.

138. 138. R. Lynd, Rambles in Ireland (London, 1912), 61–3.

139. 139. L. M. McCraith, ‘Does Ireland Want Tourists?’, The New Ireland Review 29, no. 6 (1908), 349–53, at 352; for legislation relating to incorporation and limited liability, see K. J. James, ‘Hotel History’, in The Future Past of Tourism: Historical Perspectives and Future Evolutions, ed. I. Yeoman and U. McMahon-Beattie (Bristol, 2020), 133–45, at 138–9.

140. 140. Simmons, ‘Railways, Hotels’, 205–6.

141. 141. For the summer motor coach services, see G. Mitton, Black’s Guide to Galway, Connemara and the West of Ireland, 20th edn (London, 1912), pink pages, vi.

142. 142. Simmons, ‘Railways, Hotels’, 206; K. J. James, ‘The Irishness of the Irish Inn: Narratives of Travel Accommodation in Ireland from Union to Home Rule’, Studies in Travel Writing 17, no. 1 (2013), 22–42, at 25.

143. 143. J. Lowerson, ‘Battles for the Countryside’, in Class, Culture and Social Change, ed. F. Gloversmith (Brighton, 1980), 258–80, at 271.

144. 144. H. Lorimer, ‘ “Happy Hostelling in the Highlands”: Nationhood, Citizenship and the Inter-war Youth Movement’, Scottish Geographical Magazine 113, no. 1 (1997), 42–50, at 45.

145. 145. C. S. Ward, Thorough Guide Series. North Devon and North Cornwall, 7th edn (London, 1897), xvi.

146. 146. James, ‘Hotel History’, 137.

147. 147. K. J. James, ‘ “Take My Advice, Go to Mongan’s Hotel”: Barrenness and Abundance in the Late-Victorian Connemara Landscape’, in Empty Spaces: Perspectives on Emptiness in Modern History, ed. C. J. Campbell, A. Giovine and J. Keating (London, 2019), 15–32.

148. 148. For Lough Corrib, see W. F. Wakeman, The Tourists’ Picturesque Guide to Ireland, 8th edn (Dublin, n.d. [c.1891]), 279; for the Leenaun Hotel, see A. I. Shand, Letters from the West of Ireland 1884 (Edinburgh, 1885), 119–20; and J. Gray [Harry Speight], A Tourist’s View of Ireland (London, 1885), 29.

149. 149. A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to North Wales (Northern Section), 6th edn (London, 1912), ‘Hotels, Hydropathic Establishments, and Boarding House Directory’, 4.

150. 150. Pictorial Guide to North Wales (Northern Section) (1912), 5.

151. 151. C. F. G. Cumming, In the Hebrides (London, 1883), 310–13.

152. 152. J. Pennell and E. R. Pennell, Our Journey to the Hebrides (New York, 1889), ix, 159.

153. 153. K. Grenier, ‘ “Scottishness”, “Britishness”, and Scottish Tourism, 1770–1914’, History Compass 4, no. 6 (2006), 1000–23, at 1010–11.

154. 154. J. H. Tuke, Irish Distress and Its Remedies. The Land Question. A Visit to Donegal and Connaught in the Spring of 1880, 5th edn (London, 1880), 85, 87–8.

155. 155. Shand, Letters from West Ireland (1885), 102–3.

156. 156. For parliamentary discussion of Mrs Blake’s situation on 20 June 1881, see: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1881/jun/20/evictions-ireland-renvyle-co-galway [accessed 1 February 2025]; E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross [Violet Florence Martin], Through Connemara in a Governess Cart (London, 1893), 136–8; for an advertisement for the Renvyle House Hotel, which charged 10s per day and £3 per week, see Black’s Ireland (1912), advertisements, 11.

157. 157. Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Ireland, 4th edn (London, 1878), v–vi; Recently, doubts have been raised about time-space compression as a concept for historians: A. Litvine, ‘The Annihilation of Space: A Bad (Historical) Concept’, The Historical Journal 65, no. 4 (2021), 871–900. However, rather than do away with the concept altogether, Doreen Massey has written insightfully about how it remains useful when used with precision: D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge, 1994), 146–56.

158. 158. Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 211–13; H. Carr, ‘Modernism and Travel (1880–1940)’ in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. P. Hulme and T. Youngs (Cambridge, 2002), 70–86, at 70–71.

159. 159. H. G. Wells, Anticipations, 4th edn (London, 1902), 199.

160. 160. C. S. Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, The American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000), 807–31, at 819–21.

161. 161. R. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America (New York, 1992), 10–26.