The geological imagination

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an international community of scientific-minded researchers advanced a geological narrative for the deep history of the earth. James Hutton (1726–97), Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99), Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), William Buckland (1784–1856), Charles Lyell (1797–1875), Louis Agassiz (1807–73) and many others contributed to a growing body of knowledge about geohistory, which uncovered the ‘vastness of deep time’ stretching far beyond the human past. Exact dates and timescales had yet to be worked out, and there was ongoing debate about whether geological change took place in a uniform and gradual manner or catastrophically through tsunamis, comets, volcanoes and earthquakes. However, geologists held a growing sense of confidence in the reliability of their sequence of geohistorical eras that explained the contemporary state of the earth.⁵

In the 1830s and 1840s, a rough consensus emerged around the subject of the earth’s more recent geological history. The existence of large erratic rocks and bedrock marked by gouges and scratches was explained by a synthesis of Agassiz’s glacial theory with Lyell’s drift theory. This was significant because the earth, once thought to be gradually cooling, was now understood to have passed through an ice age in its recent history, before warming up.⁶ The new geological knowledge was astonishing because it compelled people to contemplate the sheer vastness of deep time and to see seemingly fixed landscapes as dynamic, the result of rising, falling, folding, melting and eroding.⁷ The public was captivated by this new, exciting and terrifying vision of the earth. Agassiz wrote in a dramatic style about the extinction of species in response to drastic changes in the earth’s temperature, and the reading public devoured Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology (1830–33), which was republished in eleven revised editions by 1872. There was no real distinction between scientific and imaginative literature. Travel writing drew on geological texts to add new layers of interest in their descriptions of the landscape, while geologists indulged their imaginative faculties as they worked backwards in time from contemporary gouged valleys and jagged mountains to prehistoric glaciers and volcanic eruptions. The combination of geological and literary imagination is unmistakable in the writings of Robert Hunt, a mine surveyor and antiquarian who wrote works of geology and folklore and in whose poem, ‘Mount’s Bay’ (1829), the ‘pensile rocks’ and ‘granite columns’ are both ‘old registers of Time’ and the scene of druidic sacrifice, where virgin blood ‘has deeply dyed / The pond’rous crags o’erhanging side’.⁸ John Ruskin combined his romantic sensibility with geology in Of Mountain Beauty (1856), and the clergyman and geologist W. S. Symonds wrote for amateur enthusiasts in his book Record of the Rocks (1872), while popular handbooks and lecture courses equipped tourists with the knowledge to read the geological landscape for themselves.⁹

Guidebooks responded to what Murray’s Handbook for Scotland (1883) described as ‘a growing tendency amongst tourists to combine the picturesque with the scientific’ by providing lengthy geological sketches in their introductions.¹⁰ Murray’s Handbook for Ireland (1878) admitted that the scenery of the country was ‘too extensive and interesting’ to be treated fully, and referred readers to a list of recommended texts which included Edward Hull’s The Physical Geology and Geography of Ireland (1878), John Tyndall’s Forms of Water (1872) – an ‘admirable popular treatise’ on glaciers – along with Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Elements of Geology (first published in 1838), which were deemed ‘not too long or too much overloaded with details for the general reader’.¹¹

In addition to the informative introductory sketches, geology also inspired rich descriptive passages of writing, in which travellers imagined the dramatic, chaotic, violent and thrilling forces that had produced the valleys and mountains that lay before them. As he travelled through the glacial valley Nant Ffrancon, A. G. Bradley imagined the ‘primeval convulsions’ that had produced the mountains Tryfan and the Glyderau, which towered above him in a landscape of ‘escarped cliffs and fragmentary boulders’ comprising ‘one vast chaotic upheaval of volcanic rocks’. These were ‘fearful shapes’, not static but instead testament to the ‘pure ferocity’ of geological forces, which had ‘strewn’ massive rocks in ‘wild abandonment’. Looking up from Telford’s road, Bradley was struck by the appearance of the overhanging mountains ‘looking as if at any moment they might topple down and crush us’.¹² Bradley’s image of strewn rocks is mirrored in Arthur Norway’s description of Carn Brea in western Cornwall, which was ‘covered with immense blocks of granite, piled in utter confusion’.¹³ Back in north Wales, Alfred T. Story looked up and contemplated ‘the forces that have been at work through the ages scooping out the valves and hollows on either hand, and perching gigantic fragments on dizzy slopes, which one thinks a breath might topple down and bring crashing to the bottom’.¹⁴ In such passages, travel writers emulated the geological imagination of Romantic writers such as Percy Shelley, who marvelled at the ‘ravaging’ and ‘slow but irresistible progress’ of glaciers, ‘performing a work of desolation in ages’.¹⁵

The convulsing, teetering and threatening landscapes described by Bradley, Norway and Story are typical of the way that the geological imagination became part of the travel writer’s stock-in-trade. In 1889, T. Pilkington White was explicit about this when he informed the reader that his narrative was moving on from ‘the poetic and picturesque’ associations of Loch Coruisk to the geological history of the ‘colossal rock-cauldron’. Like Bradley, White also read the landscape, building up a picture of a ‘great glacier’, itself part of ‘the vast ice-sheet’ that covered the mountains and filled the valleys ‘in an archaic epoch’. The ‘grooved and seamed and smoothened’ surfaces were testament to the glacier’s progress, ‘footprints … visible upon the naked rock’. However, in place of the immediacy of Bradley’s account, White offered the reader a sense of the immensity of geological time. White’s glacier ‘ground its slow way down the basin to the sea’, and the enormous ‘poised’ boulders were not threatening but were instead gently laid down by the glacier ‘as it gradually shrank and dwindled away’.¹⁶ White then quoted a substantial passage from the second edition of Archibald Geikie’s The Scenery of Scotland (1887), in which the geologist acknowledged the ‘wonder and admiration’ inspired by the rocks, which ‘retain the impress’ of the ice ‘with a freshness and perfection truly astonishing’.¹⁷

The perilous and menacing geological landscape was not just a matter of fancy. A thorough understanding of rock types and formations was essential for climbers such as the Alpine Club members W. P. Haskett Smith and H. C. Hart, for whom the threat of dislodged stones was a reality. In their summary of the Mayo and Galway mountains, Smith and Hart warned readers about the ‘extremely treacherous’ combination of sandstone and decomposing conglomerates in the Mweelrea group, and the ‘loosely constructed’ gneissose of Binn Chuanna, which was ‘apt to disintegrate in unexpectedly massive segments’.¹⁸

The ‘geology craze’ was at its height in the mid- to late nineteenth century, but the subject remained popular in travel writing in the first half of the twentieth century, even if the lengthy Victorian introductions had been replaced by shorter geological sketches.¹⁹ In 1926, Bradley returned to Nant Ffrancon and again looked up at the ‘chaotic litter’ of boulders, ‘stratified rock’, and crags, in a landscape of ‘tortured surface’ that still threatened to collapse,²⁰ and in 1936 Hugh Quigley’s dramatic and imaginative description of the Cuillin echoed T. Pilkington White’s half a century earlier:

It requires little imagination to see the Cuillins in the ice-age, ice slipping down slowly from the peaks, leaving the crests vulnerable to the ravages of frost and whittling them down to skeleton form, while the corries were being hewn out by glaciers. These, with their cupped lochans and precipitous drop, are typical of ice-weathered formation …²¹

In the landscapes of the west, wandering through the geological ‘archive of the feet’ brought the rocks to life.²² As Story put it, the ‘scientific details’ of geology might seem dry on the page, but once outdoors the traveller would find the ‘dry bones begin to stir and the whole subject glow and kindle with life’.²³

‘Built from a north-western foundation’

The geological imagination shaped the way travellers and readers looked at the landscape, and it provided thrilling material for writers who connected contemporary landscapes with their violent geohistories of ice and fire. Structurally, however, geology shaped contemporary understandings of the history of the British-Irish Isles by providing a language of layers. In north Wales, Story explained that:

Only by following, as it were, with the mind’s eye through successive operations of this kind – the gradual submergence of the land and then its re-emergence again and again repeated – can we comprehend, and then but dimly, the age-long process of building up the earth’s crust as we now see it in this section of Wales, stratum after stratum, formation after formation, through a period of time in which a thousand years are truly but as a day.²⁴

The geological chronology of the earth was visible in the landscape, and this revealed regional variation in the age of the bedrock across Britain and Ireland. In southern and eastern regions more recent geological layers predominated, whereas in the north and west the rocks visible on the surface were much older. To travel westwards across England was therefore, according to Arthur Mee, to walk ‘down the steps of Time, treading the rocks in the order in which they were made’.²⁵

In the west, travellers were aware that they were treading on ancient ground. In their guidebook for North Wales (1887) M. J. B. Baddeley and C. S. Ward explained that, if a ‘continuous section of the country’ could be obtained, the traveller would see how the geological formations succeeded one another ‘from the newest to the most ancient, as we passed from east to west’.²⁶ More specifically, Story directed his readers to Anglesey, the area between Ynys Enlli and Nefyn, and the region between Bangor and Caernarfon, where they might study ‘to perfection’ the pre-Cambrian stratifications that comprise some of the oldest rocks in the British-Irish Isles.²⁷ Similarly, though the geology of Skye was varied, the traveller could find examples of ancient Archaean gneiss along the Sleat Peninsula.²⁸ Cornwall, too, came recommended in Ward Lock’s guidebook for tourists interested in studying ‘ancient formations’, and despite providing just a ‘very rough outline’ Walter H. Tregellas at least felt sure he had conveyed the general idea that ‘only the most ancient geological epochs, the Palæozoic, are represented’ in Cornwall.²⁹ Descriptions of Cornwall’s geology invariably drew the reader’s attention to the granite which emerged from the Devonian rock in four large patches, creating a rugged landscape ‘strewn with granite tors’ at Bodmin Moor,³⁰ and cliffscapes of granite ‘spires and pinnacles and minarets’ at Treryn Dinas.³¹ In The Sunny Side of Ireland (1903), R. Lloyd Praeger described the transition from ‘grey limestones with rich grass’ in the east of County Galway to ‘a wild region of ancient metamorphic rocks – schists, quartzites, gneisses, and granites’ that formed the ‘wild moorlands’ to the west.³² This, too, was an ‘old pre-Cambrian continent’ where Archaean gneiss could be found.³³

Moreover, the older geological layers visible in the north and west demonstrated that these regions were foundational in the development of the British-Irish Isles. In the chronological sequence of the landscape, each geological layer provided a foundation for the next, making an enduring contribution to the whole no matter how far from the visible surface it might be. Therefore, the Cambrian rocks of Wales did not merely mark out the country as geologically old. As the geologist Walter Keeping explained, the older beds in west Wales ‘slope under those to the east’, and ‘it is the primal law of stratigraphical geology that the undermost strata are the oldest’. Therefore, the ‘rocks of Cambria’ are ‘the foundation over which England has been built up’.³⁴ An article in The Cornishman made the same argument in 1905, and pointed out that it was due to the rocks of Cornwall, ‘some of the oldest in the land’, that eastern England ‘has a basis at all’.³⁵ Likewise, in his introduction to Archibald Geikie’s Geological Structure of the North-West Highlands of Scotland (1907), fellow geologist John Horne explained that the Lewisian gneiss formed ‘the foundation stones’ of the country.³⁶ Taking a broader view, Halford Mackinder declared that ‘The British Isles have been built from a north-western foundation’.³⁷

This was a persuasive image that roughly corresponded to broad patterns in the age of the bedrock, but it was also a simplification, because areas of the west such as Skye also exhibited the most recent geological layers to be found in these isles. Furthermore, while the principle of superposition explained that older rocks were overlain by younger strata, the landscape also bore witness to processes such as deformation, erosion, intrusion and crossbedding, which disrupted the neat chronological sequences summarised in travel writing.³⁸

Nevertheless, geological stratigraphy provided a framework for the idea that the British-Irish Isles constituted a coherent geographical unit. In other words, the foundational layers of the United Kingdom were geological and geographical, and this provided a base of continuity that could be traced across the Atlantic seaboard, situating the west within a broader scheme of deep historical development. This is an idea that Halford Mackinder developed in his book Britain and the British Seas (1902). Along with many geographers and geologists of the period, Mackinder divided the British-Irish Isles into south-eastern lowland and north-western upland sections. The north-west upland section was characterised by moorlands, mountains, cliffs and wild seascapes punctured by jagged promontories and islands along the oceanic coastline, from Land’s End and the Scilly Isles, round the Welsh and Irish peninsulas jutting out into the Atlantic, and north to the Hebrides and the Orkneys. Crucially, Ireland was comfortably included in the north-western portion of Mackinder’s ‘British geography’ because, he explained, ‘Ireland everywhere consists of the detached ends of the features of Great Britain’.³⁹ For instance, the mountains of Donegal were of the same ‘ancient schistose character’ as the mountains of Islay and the Grampian Highlands, and ‘we must’, insisted Mackinder, think of the Welsh uplands and the Wicklow mountains ‘as severed portions of a single mass’.⁴⁰ For these reasons, Mackinder argued that the seas which pass between the two islands ‘are truly inland waters’. The Irish Sea, he continued, was ‘wholly British, whose four sides are England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales’. In an evocative image, Mackinder placed the reader atop Snaefell, the highest point on the Isle of Man, where one could see a panorama of mountains from each country, which together formed the north-western upland portion of ‘Britain’.⁴¹ At the same time, the Narrow Seas (Mackinder’s term for the English Channel and North Sea) were by no means the ‘inland waters’ of a broader European landmass. Despite geological continuities and the historical movement of people, Mackinder did not let geology get in the way of contemporary political borders and made it clear that, in contrast to the Irish Sea, these bodies of water represented ‘the strong natural frontier of Britain’.⁴²

The imaginative and dramatic passages contained in travel writing demonstrate the influence of academic geology, which shaped the way readers and travellers engaged with western landscapes. Furthermore, the naturalisation of history, and the understanding that the oldest geological layers were visible in the north and west while providing the foundation for subsequent layers in the south and east, were significant ideas because they demonstrated an enduring commonality that transcended the different nations of these isles. This was a powerful framework that provided space for the articulation of a particular vision of Britishness; one which claimed that the United Kingdom was not simply a constitutional arrangement based on relatively recent political acts of union but had instead emerged from deep time. Using this language, writers assembled sequenced narratives of history in which the west provided evidence of a particular contribution to the whole. This began with geology, but it was applied to race, language and culture, too.

Racial ‘strata’

The development of geological knowledge has been understood as a process by which nature became historicised – the earth had a past; a history that could be studied and established.⁴³ Less attention has been paid to the concurrent process by which perceptions of human history became heavily inflected by geology. In his book Inscriptions of Nature (2020), Pratik Chakrabarti used the term ‘the naturalization of history’ to describe how ‘the deep time of rocks, landscapes, and rivers conferred new meanings upon historical antiquity’.⁴⁴ Chakrabarti is interested in nineteenth-century India, where ‘geologists, archaeologists, Orientalists, engineers, and urban planners’ came to think about Indian ‘landscape, people, past, and destiny’ in a way that was ‘infused with the deep history of nature’.⁴⁵ The naturalisation of history took place in Britain and Ireland, too, and historians such as Chris Manias, literary scholars including Stefan Collini, and the archaeologist Timothy Champion have demonstrated how geology shaped interpretations of both the remote and more recent national past.⁴⁶ This is evident in William G. Hutchinson’s 1896 translation of Ernest Renan’s essay ‘La Poésie des Races Celtiques’ (1854), in which the language of geology permeates Renan’s description of ‘entering on the subterranean strata of another world’ when passing from Normandy into Brittany. ‘A like change is apparent, I am told’, Renan continued, when passing from England into Wales, from Lowland into Highland Scotland, and entering certain districts in Ireland, where the traveller encountered differences of language, race and manners.⁴⁷ Similarly, in John Rhŷs and David Brynmor-Jones’s The Welsh People (1900), the ‘predominant element’ in the population was described as ‘the substratum contributed by the earliest lords of the soil of these islands’.⁴⁸

Geological terms came to be widely used in discussions of national development. In The Races of Britain (1885), John Beddoe suggested that, in the period when the Romans arrived on these shores, the population consisted of a ‘foundation-layer’ of ‘dark races’, on top of which lay ‘subsequent deposits’ of ‘several’ Celtic ‘strata’, the ‘most recent layers’ of which ‘were Belgic’.⁴⁹ Arthur Salmon also used the popular geological metaphor to describe skull measurement as ‘the bed-rock racial distinction’.⁵⁰ Similarly, in MacCulloch’s Misty Isle of Skye (1905), the historical layers of the island reached back from the recent ‘romantic days of Prince Charlie’ into ‘the voiceless generations of those dim ages when the island was built up, stratum by stratum, out of the unknown deep’.⁵¹ MacCulloch also saw the folk customs of the islanders as indicative of a ‘deep stratum of a belief in magic’.⁵² In Story’s North Wales (1907), the language of strata and layers filtered into descriptions of the so-called ‘Iberian’ ‘bed-rock race’ which, it was thought, predominated in the west. In an appeal to his English readers, Story argued that his book was relevant to them ‘because we get in Wales a more concentrated amalgam, as it were, of the racial influences that went into the making of England as a whole’.⁵³ It was not only Welsh geology that provided the foundation of England; Welsh racial layers did so, too.

There were other influential strains of thought circulating alongside layered and mixed understandings of national development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps most familiar is the strict concept of fixed racial essence famously expressed by Robert Knox in The Races of Men (1850). It is well established in the historiography that this strain of thought was mobilised by Teutonists to articulate what they saw as the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, but recent research has drawn more attention to the fact that Irish nationalists also adopted the same model of fixed racial categories to assert their own claims of Celtic supremacy and national distinctiveness.⁵⁴ As Bryan Ward-Perkins has shown, those wishing to construct a narrative of separate peoples and mutual hostility between the Celt and the Saxon had a lot of historical material with which to bolster their claims.⁵⁵ In contrast, Peter Mandler has emphasised the significance of a civilisational perspective in mid-Victorian Britian, which proposed a universal scheme of stadial development passing through savagery and barbarism to settled life or civilisation.⁵⁶ Furthermore, around the turn of the twentieth century geographers such as H. J. Fleure emphasised the environment as a necessary context for understanding national development.⁵⁷

These ideas were articulated in the vast academic and popular literatures of the period in hard and soft varieties, as well as in various combinations, and they drew on a wide range of academic disciplines. The language of race was also used in a variety of ways to describe nations, waves of migration, genealogies, linguistic categories, and as a generic term for any kind of group, as well as to denote groups that shared certain physical characteristics.⁵⁸ The subject of national development was, in short, complex, and contemporaries were aware of this. As Alexander MacBain wrote in his ‘Excursus and Notes’ to the second edition of W. F. Skene’s The Highlanders of Scotland (1902), the question of ‘the ethnology of the British Isles’ was ‘in an unsettled state’ because ‘the subject draws its materials from various subordinate or kindred sciences’, including archaeology, anatomy, anthropology, history and philology.⁵⁹ MacBain’s list of disciplines could pass for subheadings in the introductory section of a typical Victorian guidebook, and travel writing offers an opportunity to examine which ideas filtered into more widely read texts.

At first glance, many guidebooks seemed to endorse a model of distinct and geographically organised races. For instance, Black’s Scotland (1887) neatly divided the country into three prevailing groups: ‘the Saxon in the south; the Celtic in the Highlands; and the Scandinavian principally in the north-east, including Orkney and Shetland’.⁶⁰ At face value, this seems to be compatible with the narrative of historical progress that described ‘superior’ peoples conquering and displacing ‘inferior’ ones. In the work of historians such as Theodor Mommsen, J. A. Froude, John Mitchell Kemble, J. R. Green and E. A. Freeman, it was argued that the ‘language, customs, institutions and blood’ of the modern English nation derived from Germanic migrants from the fifth century onwards. Furthermore, so the theory went, traces of this inheritance were observable in the contemporary populations of eastern England and southern Scotland.⁶¹

There certainly were writers who subscribed to such views. In his introduction to a 1906 edition of George Borrow’s Wild Wales, the poet and literary critic Theodore Watts-Dunton applied the idea of Germanic expansion and replacement to the Welsh and English languages. After establishing his credentials as ‘a true lover of Wales’ and ‘most things Cymric’, Watts-Dunton declared ‘it is not the excellence of a tongue which makes it survive and causes it to spread over the earth, but the energy, military or commercial, of the people who speak it’. This explained ‘the vast expansion of the English language all over the world’. Combining his appreciation of Wales with an implied sense of the nation’s inferiority, he suggested that ‘if Welsh does not survive it will not be because it is not a fine language’.⁶² Michael Shoemaker took a similar approach to the Irish language, claiming that the spread of English was ‘a case of survival of the fittest’, and that attempts to revive ‘the ancient Celtic’ served no discernible good beyond being of interest to ‘students and savants’.⁶³ Watts-Dunton and Shoemaker were drawing on ideas articulated in the philological work of Otto Jespersen, who in Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905) argued that Celtic languages played no role in the development of English, as there was, in Jespersen’s words, ‘nothing to induce the ruling classes to learn the language of the inferior natives’.⁶⁴

The civilisational perspective can also be seen filtering into popular texts that emphasised the importance of political institutions rather than an inherited identity based on racial characteristics. In The Welsh People (1900), John Rhŷs and David Brynmor-Jones acknowledged that, though racially ‘Celtic’, the Welsh ‘have steadily progressed by the side of their conquerors in regard to all that goes to make up civilisation’.⁶⁵ Similarly, in 1911 the Scottish historian Robert S. Rait pointed to civilisation and language as markers of difference between the east and the Highlands in medieval Scotland, instead of the racial differences proposed by J. R. Green.⁶⁶

However, such views did not predominate in travel writing about western areas, and neat, simplified descriptions of geographically defined ethic differences (seen in Black’s Scotland (1887), above) was made necessary by the limited space available in guidebooks otherwise crammed with practical information for the tourist. In line with the work of Chris Manias on William Boyd Dawkins, Colin Kidd on Scottish nationalist thought, and James Urry on Victorian ethnographic research, academic and popular writing about the west tended towards a historical narrative of racial layering, whereby historical progress was the product of the amalgamation of peoples.⁶⁷ As Havelock Ellis put it, it was for ‘the sake of convenience’ that he labelled the Cornish ‘Celts’. And, while he intended to continue using that label, he made sure this was with the reader’s understanding that ‘the Cornish are a race well compacted of various elements’.⁶⁸

The idea that racial groups tended to amalgamate was widespread. Despite the anti-British tone of his poetry and his connections with the Young Ireland movement, George Sigerson rejected the notion that there was a clear racial distinction between the English and the Irish, arguing in Modern Ireland (1868) that waves of migration had produced a thoroughly mixed nation of Milesian, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Cromwellian and Williamite. For Sigerson, the ‘union of races’ took place through intermarriage, alliances, invasion and assimilation, until the waves subsided and the races ‘mingled together more or less completely’. The idea of racial separation was, for Sigerson, thoroughly prehistoric, and peddled by the ‘Plesiosaurian’ at a time when Ireland was in desperate need of a ‘Statesman’. ‘The races of Ireland’, Sigerson concluded, ‘have always shown a strong tendency to amalgamate, and have in fact fused together’.⁶⁹ The educationalist Sophie Bryant put forward a similar model of racial mixture in Celtic Ireland (1889), in which she sought to chart the historical development of the ‘modern Irish nation’ by describing the ‘infusion of other races’ with the ‘ancient Irish’, who were themselves ‘a mixed race’.⁷⁰

Both Sigerson and Bryant were writing against the politicisation and racialisation of Irish history as a battle between Celt and Saxon, an idea that W. D. Babington took to task in his Fallacies of Race Theories As Applied to National Characteristics (1895). Babington took direct aim at Froude, Freeman and Mommsen for their insistence on racial stereotypes and national character, asking the reader where one should look for the representative English character – ‘in the Houses of Parliament or in our convict prisons, among the opulent or easy members of the middle classes or among the people described in Mr. Sims’s painful little book, “How the Poor Live”?’⁷¹ Babington emphasised environmental influences and saw the theory of distinct races and hereditary characteristics as ‘highly and mischievously misleading’,⁷² arguing that the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain resulted not in replacement but in both groups remaining ‘as joint components of the nation’, adding that ‘such a mixture continues to exist, gradually blending and expanding’ after historical additions of Scandinavian, French and other elements.⁷³ Babington’s book was read by Rhŷs and Brynmor-Jones, who also pointed to ‘intermixture’, ‘admixture’ and the ‘composite’ makeup of the Welsh people.⁷⁴ Influence moved in the other direction, too, and philologists such as A. G. van Hamel, Wolfgang Keller and Walther Preusler looked at syntax rather than lexicon, which revealed similarities between English and Welsh not shared with other Germanic languages, suggesting ‘Celtic contact effects’ which contradicted Jespersen’s orthodox view.⁷⁵ The archaeologist Walter Johnson put it succinctly when, in Folk-Memory (1908), he declared that ‘the old teaching about the extermination of one race by another’ had been replaced by an emphasis on ‘continuity’, which was ‘the key which will open many secret chambers’.⁷⁶

Travellers and popular writers adopted the layered model of national development when narrating the longue durée settlement and movement of people across the British-Irish Isles. Building on the work of William Boyd Dawkins and John Lubbock, the British narrative typically began by describing how the Palaeolithic Ice Age race gave way to a ‘dark’ group variously called Iberian, Neolithic, Mediterranean, Ivernian or Silurian.⁷⁷ The Iberians were followed by Goidelic and Brythonic Celts, and subsequently by Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Ireland had its own, mythological, narrative of the earlier invasions, which described successive waves of Parthalons, Nemedians, Fomorians, Firbolg, Tuatha Dé Dannan and Milesians, before names familiar to British audiences entered the story as Vikings and Anglo-Normans.⁷⁸ The Irish mythological tradition has been described as a ‘distinctive’ historical narrative,⁷⁹ but it was in fact commonly understood that the Firbolg, Tuatha Dé Dannan and Milesians were alternative names for the Iberian and Celtic groups of people. According to Sabine Baring-Gould, for instance, the ‘old Silurian inhabitants’ of the Scilly Isles were the ‘kindred’ of the Firbolg in the Aran Islands,⁸⁰ and, like the Iberians, the Firbolg were typically described as ‘a swarthy, dark-haired race’.⁸¹ In his racist and disparaging pair of articles ‘Notes on Irish Ethnology’ (1896), John M. Dickson used both ‘Iberian’ and ‘Firbolg’ to refer to the racial origin of most people in Ireland along with the populations of the western Highlands of Scotland and southern Wales.⁸²

The model of racial mixture and continuity put forward by academics was paraphrased in travel books, so that the Little Guides: North Wales (1907) argued that successive conquests of Iberians, Goidels and Brythons never resulted in a ‘clean sweep made of the conquered people’. Marshalling the language of geology, the book explained that ‘a large substratum’ remained, ‘to amalgamate with the new people’.⁸³ In a summary of the racial layers that made up contemporary Wales, T. Gwynn Jones noted layers of ‘Iberians, Goidels, and Brythons’, after which ‘the Romans added another element’, and the Anglo-Saxons ‘still further complicated the racial mixture’.⁸⁴ J. D. Mackie pointed out that the populations of Scotland and England contained the same racial layers of ‘Anglo-Saxon stock’, as well as ‘a Norse strain, a Celtic strain’, and an Iberian strain which was ‘well-marked’, meaning that the two countries were considered ‘far more akin in race’ than was recognised by the simple dichotomy of the ‘Celtic’ and the ‘Teutonic’.⁸⁵ Mixture occurred at the local level, too, and MacCulloch explained that the ‘alien race of Norsemen’ formed colonies in Skye while ‘the Celtic element was too strong to disappear’. The result was that ‘the two commingled’.⁸⁶ Travel writers and guidebooks reflected the academic understanding of racial layering, offering a corrective to newspaper columns that simplified the picture to serve political arguments. As the geographer H. J. Fleure put it in his introductory chapter published in the Blue Guides: Wales (1922), ‘journalists who speak of a Celtic “race” are very far out’.⁸⁷

Discussions of racial layering were influenced by folklore studies, which attempted to shed light on the murky prehistoric past. In an 1881 article for the Cornhill Magazine, the naturalist and Celtophile Grant Allen suggested that the elves, fairies and goblins in traditional tales were exaggerated representations of the Iberian race, and originated ‘from the early days of the Celtic or Teutonic struggles with the small dark race which preceded them’.⁸⁸ Taking up Allen’s idea, Arthur Salmon referred to Cornish pixies and knockers as the folk memory of ‘a rather short race conquered and absorbed by the Celts’, while the giants of Cornish tradition might represent ‘a distorted and exaggerated recollection of an extinct race’ of ‘Palaeolithic men’, who preceded the Iberian group.⁸⁹ According to Charles Batsford and Harry Fry, the mysterious Picts were one of several stocks that had ‘contributed variously’ to Scotland’s ‘evolution’, who had left ‘scanty clues’ as to their appearance, which included ancient crosses and ‘the memory of “pixies” in fairy tales and folklore’.⁹⁰

Archaeology also supported the notion of racial mixture and amalgamation. Much of the early scholarship equated archaeological cultures with racial groups,⁹¹ and in the late 1860s John Thurnam outlined a three-age model of the long-barrows and round-barrows, which concluded that the former were the older structures as they contained no metal, whereas the latter contained bronze tools and pottery of superior artistry. In line with the evidence of civilisational progress, the long narrow skulls of the long-barrows were associated with the late Stone Age whereas the brachycephalic skulls found in the round-barrows belonged to Bronze Age migrants and were probably Celtic.⁹² Guidebooks made the same distinction between the ‘more ancient’ long-barrows and the ‘less remote’ round-barrows with their ‘bronze implements’.⁹³ Quoting the philologist Edwin Norris, Murray’s Cornwall (1879) described the ‘pre-Celtic’ race as ‘the men of narrow skulls’, while Sabine Baring-Gould explained that this ‘dusky, short-statured race, with long heads’ were present in both Ireland and Wales.⁹⁴ Significantly, there was also evidence of skulls that were neither long nor round but somewhere in between, which suggested that racial mixing had followed the arrival of the Bronze Age migrants.⁹⁵ The Little Guides: North Wales (1907) echoed Thurnam’s views, commenting that ‘the two types have been found in the same cromlech’. The ‘neolithic peoples’ and the ‘Celts who largely displaced them’ lived together ‘and so became mixed in their tombs’.⁹⁶ As Thurnam himself wrote, rather than extermination, ‘it is far more likely that they reduced them to slavery, or drove them, in part, into the interior and western parts of the island’.⁹⁷

‘The great human drift’

The predominance of mixture and amalgamation in broad-sweep historical narratives of the British-Irish Isles did not, however, dispossess western landscapes of their imaginative power. The distinctiveness of the west was to be found in the greater concentration of the ubiquitous Iberian and Celtic racial layers. This idea was analogous to the geological picture, which described older layers of rock in the north and west that underlay the newer layers in the south and east. As travellers, archaeologists, ethnologists and their readers moved westwards, evidence of the earlier waves of Iberian and Celtic settlement increased, while evidence of Roman, Saxon, Norman and other subsequent waves decreased and perhaps even disappeared entirely. It is worth returning to Alfred Story’s North Wales (1907) because he made the racial-geological analogy explicit. In Wales, he wrote, there existed ‘a more concentrated amalgam, as it were, of the racial influences that went into the making of England as a whole’, and the most expressive element was the Iberian ‘bed-rock race’.⁹⁸

This went further than simply acknowledging that the west was geologically and racially older than other areas of the British-Irish Isles. Historical narratives of migration were dynamic, and described the movement of people from the European mainland in the east to the Atlantic shoreline in the west. This was often done using the metaphor of ‘waves’ rolling onto the shore,⁹⁹ and, like the waves of the retreating tide, the first Iberian and Celtic invaders from Continental Europe were understood to have covered the British-Irish Isles entirely and reached the western edges of the land, leaving a concentrated racial residue that was strongly expressed in contemporary populations. Subsequent migratory waves were increasingly shallow, leaving traces that were insignificant to the point of being practically untraceable in the modern population. For writers such as Sophie Bryant, understanding the history of the ancient Irish meant contemplating ‘all those communities that moved slowly or rapidly westwards to find new worlds’.¹⁰⁰

Sabine Baring-Gould specialised in reciting westward waves of migration in an evocative manner. After establishing that the ‘Iberian’ people ‘migrated at some unknown period’ into Britain and Ireland, Baring-Gould described the dramatic arrival of the Celts:

Then came rushing from the East great hordes of fair-haired, round-headed men, with blue eyes. Their original homes were perhaps the Alps, but more probably Siberia. This new race was the Celt. It was divided into two branches, the Goidels and the Brythons, and the Goidels came first.¹⁰¹

The narrative continued when the Jutes, Angles and Saxons ‘rolled back the unfortunate Brittons westward’ and into ‘their last refuge’ in the Welsh mountains.¹⁰² While acknowledging mixture and assimilation, Baring-Gould described centuries-long patterns of population movement with an immediacy that created the impression of a single group of people gradually retreating into the west. Elsewhere, Baring-Gould described the Scilly Isles and the Aran Islands as the ‘last refuge’ of retreating peoples,¹⁰³ and described the preponderance of ‘dark men and women’ near Land’s End, in the Western Isles of Scotland, and in western Ireland as ‘the last relics’ of an ‘infusion of blood’ belonging to ‘gentle, intelligent, artistic, unwarlike people’ who were ‘pressed into corners by more energetic, military, and aggressive races’.¹⁰⁴ Baring-Gould’s exciting narrative style is typical of the genre, and Michael Floyd’s description of the ‘great stone forts’ of Inis Mór was equally dramatic: they represented ‘the last line of defence of the Bronze halberd-men’ who were ‘driven ever westward by the conquering sword-bearers of a new culture’.¹⁰⁵ In her account of a week on the Aran Islands the English antiquarian Mary Ellen Bagnall-Oakeley preferred Irish mythological terminology, and described how the Firbolg were ‘attacked by a great army of the Tuatha Dé Dannan who were moving westward’, and ‘made their last stand’ in great stone forts such as Dún Aonghasa.¹⁰⁶ The westward metanarrative found academic support in John Rhŷs, who held the view that the Goidelic wave of migration entered these isles on the east coast and progressed westwards into Ireland ‘when the Brythons arrived and began to press the Goidels in the west’.¹⁰⁷

The westward-moving metanarrative was not without its caveats, though, and Rhŷs’s view that the Goidelic Celts had passed through Britain and into Ireland before the arrival of the Brythonic Celts was contested. Evidence of Gaelic inscriptions found in western Wales confirmed that Gaelic-speaking communities had settled in Wales, but for Sophie Bryant, Alexander MacBain and the philologist Kuno Meyer, their arrival in Wales came much later and from the west. In their view the Gaels, having arrived in Ireland by sea from Europe, began raiding and settling in Wales, and this process gathered pace from the third and fourth centuries. In Meyer’s words, ‘no Gael ever set his foot on British soil save from a vessel that had put out from Ireland’.¹⁰⁸ Furthermore, the geographer E. G. Bowen put forward a variation of the narrative that involved both eastward and westward patterns of migration. Bowen argued that Britain’s south-eastern ‘continental’ culture had developed over millennia as a result of westward migrations from the European plains, including the ‘western spread of the Saxons’. In the north and west, however, an ‘oceanic culture’ had developed through migrations from Iberia and Brittany, which entered these isles at the ‘Atlantic Fringe’ and made their way eastwards. Bowen suggested that the continental and oceanic cultures met at the geological and climatic border that ran ‘roughly from Darlington to Dawlish’.¹⁰⁹

Nevertheless, the nuances and caveats often got lost in compelling passages of writing that simplified and summarised the bigger picture, and the broad thrust of the narrative remained westward. As Arthur Salmon put it in Heart of the West (1922), the matter was ‘too complicated and too difficult to be treated fully’, and readers were instead offered the striking image that the west was ‘the last refuge of races that were pushed backward by advancing tides of population from Europe’.¹¹⁰ To imagine what Sophie Bryant called ‘the great human drift’ across the deep history of these isles was to turn westwards and gaze towards the Atlantic.¹¹¹

Finding specimens in the field

Beyond expansive narratives that described millennia of population movements, travellers were inspired by contemporary developments in ethnography to find specimens of supposed racial types ‘in the field’. Travelling through the different parts of the United Kingdom prompted travellers and their readers to think about race in ways they otherwise might not. As a review of Mrs Stanley Gardiner’s We Two and Shamus (1913) recognised, when the author and her husband were in Cambridge ‘they never describe themselves as Saxons’. But when they were in Ireland ‘they were at once terribly conscious of race’.¹¹² Some writers, such as the publisher and Welsh language advocate John E. Southall, were clear that discussions of race often referred to typical types in the abstract. Southall pointed out that, while it may be possible to discuss ‘the blood of the average Englishman’, it was doubtful that ‘an individual specimen anywhere exists’.¹¹³ Having established this caveat, Southall proceeded to quantify the racial layers of the English, assigning percentage scores to the composite layers of ‘Saxon and Anglian’ (45), ‘Celtic’ (30), ‘Danish’ (15), ‘Dano-Norman’ (5), and ‘French, Jewish, Roman &c.’ (5). When he turned his attention to the Welsh, Southall suggested average scores for layers of ‘Celtic’ (70), ‘Saxon and Anglian’ (15), ‘Danish’ (5), ‘Norman and Roman’ (5), and ‘Flemish, &c.’ (5).¹¹⁴ In contrast, travel writers composed passages of vivid description that discussed race not in an abstract form but instead applied it to the contemporary people of the west. In an entertaining passage, A. G. Bradley recalled an incident at a Welsh tarn when a ‘sudden change from sunshine to mist and gloom’ spooked his young gillie, who had been ‘left so long to his imaginings’. As the ravens’ croaks echoed among the high crags, Bradley connected the boy’s supposed racial heritage with the stereotype of the imaginative and sensitive Celt, and wondered what the ‘little Goidel or Iberian’ had seen or heard. Given the tarn’s significance as ‘a very haunt of magic memories’, Bradley suggested that the young boy may have perceived ‘things not revealed to a Saesenog’.¹¹⁵

Other writers borrowed directly from physical anthropology, such as Baring-Gould’s description of the ‘well-developed skulls’ of the ‘ancient inhabitants’ of Wales, who were followed by an invasion of people with ‘round heads, bullet-shaped skulls, with beetling brows, and jaws that speak of brute force’.¹¹⁶ Writing in 1897, Havelock Ellis was more explicit about the research that shaped his description of the ‘two aboriginal elements’ that were observable as distinctive Cornish ‘types’ in the contemporary population. The first was ‘a distinctly feminine type’: ‘slender, lithe’ and short, ‘without bony prominences’ on the face, and the eyebrows ‘finely pencilled’. The second was ‘large and solid’, characterised by prominent ‘arches over the eyes’, ‘massive’ jaws and a ‘rugged prognathous character which seems to belong to a lower race’. These were the Iberian and Celtic types, respectively, which had combined to produce a third type that was ‘large, dignified, handsome’, with ‘prominent noses and well-formed chins’ and ‘unaffected grace and refinement of manner’, which set them apart from the Anglo-Saxon type.¹¹⁷ Ellis was influenced by the work of Scottish anthropologist and anatomist J. G. Garson, who applied the Cephalic Index to the contemporary population of Abyssinia in addition to the Iberian and Celtic races of Britain.¹¹⁸

Of course, most travellers stopped short of using the terminology of physical anthropologists. Rather than dolichocephalic and brachycephalic, it was more common for travellers to anecdotally comment on the ‘dark’ features of the people they met, such as Mourteen, the ‘old dark man’ encountered by J. M. Synge on the Aran Islands, or the ‘dark-visaged, elderly dame’ spotted by Malcom Ferguson at a service in Dunvegan Free Church.¹¹⁹ Similarly, Madame de Bovet commented on a girl she spotted in the ‘Highlands of Connemara’, whose ‘great dark eyes’ looked out towards the sea, and Katherine Bates spotted a ‘dark, thin, bright-eyed Cornishwoman’ in a railway carriage.¹²⁰ As they travelled through Connemara, Somerville and Ross described the appearance of Widow Joyce, whose ‘large brown eyes, and dark hair’ marked her out as a ‘specimen’ of the ‘Spanish type of beauty that is said to abound in Connemara’.¹²¹ Arthur Salmon explained that the ‘small size, dark skin and dark hair’ of the Iberian race had left ‘traces, in speech and physiognomy, to this very day’,¹²² and that these were observable in the west of Cornwall, where ‘the dark of brunette type prevails and increases’.¹²³ The abundant allusions to dark features in travel writing demonstrates the popularisation of ideas put forward by John Beddoe, John Thurnam and other intellectuals who described the dark hair, eyes, and skin of the so-called Iberian racial layer.¹²⁴ Beddoe was a founding member of the Ethnological Society, and served as president of the Anthropological Institute between 1889 and 1891, and his influential book The Races of Britain (1885) popularised the method of connecting facial features and anthropometric measurements to racial origin. It was in The Races of Britain that Beddoe developed his ‘Index of Nigrescence’, which placed an individual on the scale by quantifying the amount of residual melanin in the skin, eyes and hair follicles. Additionally, attention was also paid to the jaw, brow and shape of the skull, which built on the earlier ideas of the anatomist Petrus Camper and the physiologist Johann Kaspar Lavater. The darkest and most prognathous individuals on the scale were described by Beddoe as ‘Africanoid’, which he claimed determined not just racial origin but also the location of the individual on the scale, in between the extremes of primitivism and civilisation.¹²⁵

In some cases, Beddoe’s Index of Nigrescence could produce results that raised doubts about the connection between prehistoric racial groups and contemporary populations in certain areas of the west. In 1891, the English ethnographer A. C. Haddon and Irish anthropologist C. R. Browne produced an ethnography of the Aran Islands. Working as part of the recently established Anthropometric Laboratory at Trinity College, Dublin, and armed with instruments such as Garson’s ‘Traveller’s Anthropometer’, Flower’s Craniometer, and a sliding rule originally used by Galton’s Anthropometrical Laboratory, Haddon and Browne collected data on 436 Aran Islanders and placed them on Beddoe’s Index of Nigrescence and the Cephalic Index.¹²⁶ Their methods were invasive, and they described the necessity of feeling their instruments ‘actually pressing against the bony wall of the external auditory meatus’ of their ‘subjects’, and although some of the islanders ‘demurred at first’ the authors claimed that none ‘absolutely objected to having the plugs of the instrument inserted into their ear-holes’.¹²⁷ Having prodded, observed and measured their subjects, the results indicated that the ‘Aranites’ did not conform to the small and dark type characteristic of the Firbolgs or Iberians. This was in line with Beddoe’s own observations when he visited Inis Mór in 1861, and Beddoe also pointed to the English garrison left there by Cromwell, where the soldiers ‘subsequently apostatised to Catholicism, intermarried with the natives, and so vitiated the Firbolgian pedigree’.¹²⁸ Baring-Gould made similar comments about St Mary’s, the largest of the Scilly Isles, where the ‘Ivernians’ left few visible traces due to the invasions of Irish colonists and also to a Bedfordshire regiment that was stationed there during the Civil Wars.¹²⁹

Back in the Aran Islands, Haddon and Browne added to Beddoe’s Cromwellian example with the settling of the island in the Christian period by Clan Mac Teige O’Brien and then the O’Flaherties of Iar-Connaught, neither of whom were considered descendants of the Firbolg. When the many wrecks and occasional Galway immigrants were added to the growing ‘mixture of blood’, Haddon and Browne concluded: ‘To what race or races the Aranites belong, we do not pretend to say, but it is pretty evident that they cannot be Firbolgs, if the latter are correctly described as “small, dark-haired, and swarthy.”’¹³⁰ This view filtered into the guidebooks, and Beddoe’s line about the ‘vitiated … Firbolgian pedigree’ was quoted in numerous editions of Black’s Guide to Ireland.¹³¹ However, the idea that the Aran Islanders were the descendants of ancient peoples persisted into the twentieth century, especially among Celticists. In 1964, John Messenger was writing against the strong influence of primitivist and nativist literary and documentary depictions of the islands when his genealogical research on Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr revealed that ‘all of the families in these communities trace descent from immigrants who arrived in Aran after the latter part of the 17th century’. The first census of 1821 showed ‘numerous’ English surnames on the islands, a result of ‘successive garrisons of Commonwealth, Royalist, and Williamite forces’ occupying Aran between 1652 and 1710.¹³²

When it came to spotting specimens in the field, though, most travellers did not feel they needed craniometers or the support of anthropometric institutions before declaring the racial makeup of the people they encountered. One of the most eclectic examples of the traveller’s characteristic confidence was expressed by The Times nature writer Anthony Collett in The Changing Face of England (1926). Collett, like many others, accepted a layered model of national development, and described England as a country of ‘many races’ that had experienced ‘centuries of migration and unification’, while also maintaining that those differences had not been entirely erased and could be observed in the contemporary population. In Wales Collett spotted ‘a tweed-clad sheep-farmer’ who struck him as French-looking, and, placing the reader on a Cornish street where ‘Africa and Asia confront each other’, described types that included the ‘dervish-like chapelgoer’, the agricultural worker or shopkeeper who seemed ‘more like a Somali than an Englishman’, and the person whose ancestor ‘may have led a horde of the sons of Turan over the flats of the Dogger Bank on foot into England’.¹³³ These were ‘uncertain’ speculations, ‘not wholly baseless’, in Collett’s words, but also delivered with levity and with the intention of humour.¹³⁴ And, while some of Collett’s comparisons were eccentric, his method would have been familiar to many of the other travel writers discussed in this chapter. In Collett’s words, ‘it is not always necessary to measure skulls or make elaborate studies of the colour of hair or eyes to find strong traces of a Celtic population’ because ‘[a]s we travel westwards … the change of speech is reflected in a change of face’.¹³⁵

Conclusion

This chapter has shown how the west played an important and underappreciated role in academic and popular understandings of the deep historical development of the British-Irish Isles. The geological imagination inspired dramatic passages of description in travel writing, and revealed that the deepest foundations of the United Kingdom could be found by looking to the west and walking ‘down the steps of Time’. Geology provided a stratigraphical model and a series of terms that were used to articulate the idea that these isles were also made up of racial layers, or ‘strata’, and the waves of historical migration – the ‘great human drift’ – also seemed to have moved in a broadly westward direction. It was along the Atlantic seaboard, then, that a greater concentration of the ubiquitous Iberian and Celtic racial layers were visible to the traveller, who brought abstract theories to life in vivid passages of writing about the contemporary populations of the west. The final chapter explores the political implications of the layered understanding of Britain and Ireland, which became more explicit from the 1880s as the Home Rule debates intensified.

Notes

1. 1. Robinson, Little Gaelic Kingdom, 380.

2. 2. For dual identities, see Colley, Britons. For blending, see Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain, 2.

3. 3. P. Chakrabarti, Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Baltimore, MD, 2020).

4. 4. C. Manias, ‘Uncovering the Deepest Layers of the British Past, 1850–1914’, in Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity, ed. M. Gibson, S. Trower and G. Tregigda (London, 2013), 49–59; C. Manias, ‘ “Our Iberian Forefathers”: The Deep Past and Racial Stratification of British Civilization, 1850–1914’, Journal of British Studies 51, no. 4 (2012), 910–35.

5. 5. M. J. S. Rudwick, Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago, 2008), 3–6; M. J. S. Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago, 2014), 177–80. For the early influence of geology on literary culture in Scotland, see T. Furniss, Discovering the Footsteps of Time: Geological Travel Writing about Scotland, 1700–1820 (Edinburgh, 2018).

6. 6. Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History, 177–80.

7. 7. Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 32–3, 43–4.

8. 8. R. Hunt, The Mount’s Bay: A Descriptive Poem (Penzance, 1829), 63. For further discussion, see S. Trower, ‘Geological Folklore’, in Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity, ed. M. Gibson, S. Trower, and G. Tregigda (London, 2013), 117–29, at 117–123.

9. 9. Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 36–7, 48–9, 53–4, 125. W. S. Symonds, Record of the Rocks; Or, Notes on the Geology, Natural History, and Antiquities of North and South Wales, Devon and Cornwall (London, 1872), dedicated to Charles Lyell.

10. 10. Murray’s Scotland (1883), introduction, 23.

11. 11. Murray’s Ireland (1878), introduction, 14–15.

12. 12. Bradley, Highways and Byways in North Wales (1898), 254–5. For other examples, see Baddeley and Ward, Thorough North Wales I (1889), x; and J. G. Shipman, Holiday Letters of a Geologist (Nottingham, 1887), 208.

13. 13. Norway, Devon and Cornwall (1897), 318.

14. 14. A. T. Story, The Little Guides: North Wales (London, 1907), 31–3.

15. 15. Quoted in Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 121–4.

16. 16. White, ‘Camped Out’ (1889), 217.

17. 17. A. Geikie, The Scenery of Scotland: Viewed in Connection with its Physical Geography, 2nd edn (London, 1887 [1865]), 229–31; White, ‘Camped Out’ (1889), 217–18.

18. 18. Smith and Hart, Wales and Ireland (1895), 156–67.

19. 19. For examples of geological sketches in the early twentieth century, see R. Lloyd Praeger, ‘Natural History of the South and West of Ireland’, in The Sunny Side of Ireland: How to See It by the Great Southern and Western Railway, ed. J. O’Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1903), 260–77; Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), introduction, 14–17; Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), introduction, 17–20; T. M. Finlay, ‘Geology and Scenery’, in Complete Scotland, ed. Mackie and Finlay (1933), 37–46.

20. 20. Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (1926), 178–9.

21. 21. Quigley, Highlands of Scotland (1939), 68–9.

22. 22. The ‘archive of the feet’ has entered general use, but originates with S. Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), 24.

23. 23. Quigley, Highlands of Scotland (1939), 22.

24. 24. Story, Little Guides: North Wales (1907), 9–10.

25. 25. A. Mee, The King’s England: Shropshire (London, 1939), 2. For other examples, see M. J. B. Baddeley and C. S. Ward, Thorough Guide Series. North Wales (Part II), 2nd edn (London, 1887), x; Howarth, Scenic Heritage (1937), 3.

26. 26. Thorough North Wales II (1887), x.

27. 27. Story, Little Guides: North Wales (1907), 10–11.

28. 28. Jenkinson’s North Wales (1878), lxviii. For the ‘considerable variety’ of Skye’s geology, see A. Harker, The West Highlands and the Hebrides: A Geologist’s Guide for Amateurs (Cambridge, 1941), 1–2, 75–94.

29. 29. C. S. Ward and M. J. B. Baddeley, South Devon and South Cornwall, with a Full Description of Dartmoor and the Isles of Scilly, 9th edn (London, n.d. c.1900), 12–13; Tregellas, Cornwall (1878), 2–3.

30. 30. A. L. Salmon, The Little Guides: Cornwall (London, 1905 [1903]), 5.

31. 31. Norway, Devon and Cornwall (1897), 300.

32. 32. Praeger, ‘Natural History’, (1903), 260–77.

33. 33. G. A. J. Cole, ‘Geology’, in Connaught, ed. G. Fletcher (Cambridge, 1922), 41–59, at 42; Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 63; Mitton, Black’s Galway, Connemara (1912), 209.

34. 34. Keeping, ‘Geology of Aberystwyth’ (1878), 536–7. In modern geology this is the principle of superposition.

35. 35. Ginever, ‘ “One and All” Notes’, 1905, 4.

36. 36. J. Horne, ‘Introductory’, in The Geological Structure of the North-West Highlands of Scotland, ed. A. Geikie (Glasgow, 1907), 1–10, at 2.

37. 37. H. J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (London, 1902), 357.

38. 38. Some guidebooks acknowledged the complexity of the geological picture, including ‘volcanic disturbance’ that had interrupted neat chronological sequences of rock: Baddeley and Ward, Thorough North Wales II (1887), x.

39. 39. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (1902), 79.

40. 40. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (1902), 76, 78.

41. 41. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (1902), 20–21.

42. 42. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (1902), 16–17.

43. 43. Rudwick, Worlds before Adam, 6.

44. 44. Chakrabarti, Inscriptions of Nature, 5–6.

45. 45. Chakrabarti, Inscriptions of Nature, 1–3.

46. 46. Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’, 914; S. Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain (Oxford, 1991), 97–8; T. Champion, ‘Three Nations of One? Britain and the National Use of the Past’, Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe, ed. T. Champion and M. Díaz-Andreu (London, 1996), 119–45, at 119.

47. 47. Renan, ‘Poetry of the Celtic Races’ (1896), 1–2.

48. 48. J. Rhŷs and D. Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People: Chapters on Their Origin, History, Laws, Language, Literature and Characteristics (London, 1900), 34–5.

49. 49. J. Beddoe, The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (Bristol, 1885), 29.

50. 50. A. L. Salmon, The Heart of the West: A Book of the West Country from Bristol to Land’s End (London, 1922), 13.

51. 51. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 19.

52. 52. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 234.

53. 53. Story, Little Guides: North Wales (1907), 61–3.

54. 54. G. Beiner and O. Y. Steinberg, ‘Racializing Irish Historical Consciousness’, in Race in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. M. Sen and J. M. Weng (Cambridge, 2024), 42–58; L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (New York, 1968); H. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo- Saxons (Montreal, 1982).

55. 55. B. Ward-Perkins, ‘Why Did the Anglo-Saxons Not Become More British?’, English Historical Review, 115, no. 462 (2000), 513–33.

56. 56. P. Mandler, ‘ “Race” and “Nation” in Mid-Victorian Thought’, in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. S. Collini, R. Whatmore, and B. Young (Cambridge, 2000), 224–44.

57. 57. P. Gruffudd, ‘Back to the Land: Historiography, Rurality and the Nation in Interwar Wales’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19, no. 1 (1994), 61–77, at 62; A. Rees, ‘Doing “Deep Big History”: Race, Landscape and the Humanity of H. J. Fleure (1877–1969)’, History of the Human Sciences 32, no. 1 (2019), 99–120; also see J. A. Campbell and D. N. Livingstone, ‘Neo-Lamarckism and the Development of Geography in the United States and Great Britain’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 8, no. 3 (1983), 267–94, at 283–4; E. G. Bowen and H. J. Fleure, ‘Denmark and Wales’, Geography 15, no. 6 (1930), 468–76, especially 468, 471–6.

58. 58. The complexities and contradictions are discussed in Readman, Storied Ground, 141; P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT, 2006), 73, D. A. Lorimer, ‘Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities, 1850–1914’, in The Victorians and Race, ed. S. West (Aldershot, 1996), 12–33, at 14, 16, 19.

59. 59. A. MacBain, ‘Excursus and Notes, by the Editor’, in W. F. Skene, The Highlanders of Scotland (Stirling, 1902 [1837]), 381–422, at 381.

60. 60. Black’s Scotland (1887), xiii.

61. 61. Manias, ‘Layers of the British Past’, 49, 55–6. For a summary of race and Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, see MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History, 89–103. Freeman was more overtly conscious of race than Green. For a comparison, see T. Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge, 2011), 240–53.

62. 62. T. Watts-Dunton, ‘Talk about “Wild Wales”’, in G. Borrow, Wild Wales (New York, 1906 [1862]), vii–xxiii, at x–xi. Hostility to European languages was a stereotype of the English tourist; see W. J. Farquharson, ‘The Coming of the British Tourist’, The New Ireland Review 5, no. 6 (1896), 339–43, at 340.

63. 63. Shoemaker, Wanderings in Ireland (1908), 86.

64. 64. O. Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language (Leipzig, 1905), 39.

65. 65. Rhŷs and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (1900), xxiii–xxiv.

66. 66. R. S. Rait, The Making of the Nations: Scotland (London, 1911), vii.

67. 67. Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’; Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology’; J. Urry, Before Social Anthropology: Essays on the History of British Anthropology (Reading, 1993), see chapter ‘Englishmen, Celts and Iberians: The Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom, 1892–1899’.

68. 68. Ellis, ‘Men of Cornwall’ (April 1897), 330. For an Irish example, see W. B. Macrone, Through Connemara (Galway, 1888), 1–2.

69. 69. G. Sigerson, ‘Pre-Historic Politicians on Ireland’, in G. Sigerson, Modern Ireland (London, 1868), 378–87, quotations at 381, 385, 387. Also see ‘Irish Republicanism’, in Sigerson, Modern Ireland (1868), 11–19.

70. 70. S. Bryant, Celtic Ireland (London, 1889), ix, xiv.

71. 71. W. B. Babington, Fallacies of Race Theories as Applied to National Characteristics (London, 1895), 3, 6, 192–3.

72. 72. Babington, Fallacies of Race Theories (1895), 10–11.

73. 73. Babington, Fallacies of Race Theories (1895), 233–5.

74. 74. Rhŷs and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (1900), 13, 34–5.

75. 75. M. Filppula, J. Klemola, and H. Paulasto, English and Celtic in Contact (London, 2008), 224–6.

76. 76. W. Johnson, Folk-Memory, or the Continuity of British Archaeology (Oxford, 1908), 56.

77. 77. Baring-Gould uses Silurian, in reference to the dark-featured Silures as described by Tacitus and not the Palaeozoic geological period. See S. Baring-Gould, A Book of the West: Being an Introduction to Devon and Cornwall, vol. 2, Cornwall (London, 1899), 331.

78. 78. Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), introduction, 50–51.

79. 79. Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’, 912.

80. 80. Baring-Goud, Book of the West, vol. 2, Cornwall (1899), 331. Sophie Bryant was in the minority (and in line with an earlier generation of Celticists) when she suggested that the Firbolg were a Celtic race alongside the Tuatha Dé Dannan and the Milesians. See Bryant, Celtic Ireland (1889), 17, 20–21.

81. 81. Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), introduction, 50–51.

82. 82. J. M. Dickson, ‘Notes on Irish Ethnology’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology 2, no. 3 (April 1896), 156–60; J. M. Dickson, ‘Notes on Irish Ethnology. No. II’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology 4, no. 1 (October 1897), 12–17.

83. 83. Story, Little Guides: North Wales (1907), 62–3.

84. 84. T. G. Jones, ‘The History and Social System of Wales’, in The Blue Guides: Wales, ed. F. Muirhead (London, 1922), xxvii–xxxiv, at xxvii.

85. 85. J. D. Mackie, ‘The History of Scotland’, in Complete Scotland, ed. Mackie and Finlay (1933), 23–36, at 23.

86. 86. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1927), 195.

87. 87. Fleure, ‘Land of Wales’ (1922), xxvi.

88. 88. G. Allen, ‘Who Were the Fairies?’, Cornhill Magazine 43 (March 1881), 335–48, at 348. Allen used the term ‘Euskarian’ instead of Iberian. Allen is also discussed in Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’, 932.

89. 89. Salmon seemed particularly interested in the ‘knockers’, which were ‘found in most mining districts’ and were known to commit acts of mischief; see Salmon, Cornwall (1925), 42–3. For Baring-Gould’s similar rationalisation, see S. Baring-Gould, A Book of Folk-Lore (London, 1913), especially chapter 9, ‘Pixies and Brownies’.

90. 90. Batsford and Fry, Face of Scotland (1934), 7.

91. 91. For a summary of the development of archaeology as a discipline, from ‘culture history’ to ‘post-processual’ archaeology, see G. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge, 2007), 25–7. For nineteenth-century archaeology, see S. Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT, 1994). For the Celt in archaeology, see T. Champion, ‘The Celt in Archaeology’, in Celticism, ed. T. Brown (Amsterdam, 1996), 61–78.

92. 92. Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’, 921.

93. 93. A. T. Story, The Little Guides: North Wales, 2nd edn (London, 1920 [1907]), 77–8.

94. 94. Murray’s Cornwall (1879), introduction, 43; Baring-Gould, Book of North Wales (1903), 1–3.

95. 95. Rhŷs and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (1900), 1. This is discussed in Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’, 921.

96. 96. Story, Little Guides: North Wales (1920), 77.

97. 97. Quoted in Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’, 920–21.

98. 98. Story, Little Guides: North Wales (1907), 61–3.

99. 99. For example, see Sigerson, Modern Ireland (1868), 381.

100. 100. Bryant, Celtic Ireland (1889), xiv.

101. 101. Baring-Gould, Book of North Wales (1903), 3.

102. 102. Baring-Gould, Book of North Wales (1903), 5–6.

103. 103. Baring-Gould, Book of the West, vol. 2, Cornwall (1899), 331.

104. 104. S. Baring-Gould, Book of the West, vol. 1, Devon, pp. 2–3.

105. 105. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 6–7. The halberd is a Bronze Age weapon, made with a blade attached to a wooden or metal shaft.

106. 106. M. E. Bagnall-Oakeley, ‘A Week in the Aran Islands’, in Proceedings of the Clifton Antiquarian Club for 1893–96, ed. A. E. Hudd, vol. 3 (Exeter, 1897), 99–107, at 103.

107. 107. Rhŷs and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (1900), 11. Arthur Salmon repeated this in Cornwall (1925), 25.

108. 108. Bryant, Celtic Ireland (1889), 35–9; Kuno Meyer, quoted in MacBain, ‘Excursus and Notes’ (1903), 383.

109. 109. E. G. Bowen, ‘Early Christianity in the British Isles: A Study in Historical Geography’, Geography 17, no. 4 (1932), 267–76, at 267–8, 272–3. H. J. Fleure also described the dual movement of ‘agriculturalists westward’ from central Europe, and ‘coastwise movements around the Iberian peninsula and along the west of France’, in ‘The Welsh People’, Wales 10 (1939), 265–9, at 265.

110. 110. Salmon, Heart of the West (1922), 16.

111. 111. Bryant, Celtic Ireland (1889), xiv.

112. 112. ‘Mrs Stanley Gardiner, We Two and Shamus (London, 1913)’, The Athenaeum 4470 (1913), 691.

113. 113. J. E. Southall, Wales and her Language (London, 1892), 329.

114. 114. Southall, Wales and her Language (1892), 329.

115. 115. Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (1926), 96–7.

116. 116. Baring-Gould, Book of North Wales (1903), 214–15.

117. 117. Ellis, ‘Men of Cornwall’ (April 1897), 330–31.

118. 118. J. G. Garson, ‘On the Morphological Characters of the Abyssinians’, in J. Theodore Bent, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians: Being a Record of Travel and Research in Abyssinia in 1893 (London, 1896), 286–96; J. G. Garson, ‘Remarks on Skulls Dredged from the Thames in the Neighbourhood of Kew’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 20 (1891), 20–5.

119. 119. Synge, Aran Islands (1907), 3; Ferguson, Rambles in Skye (1885), 73.

120. 120. De Bovet, Tour in Ireland (1891), 214; Bates, Gretna Green to Land’s End (1908), 355.

121. 121. Somerville and Ross, Through Connemara (1893), 94

122. 122. Salmon, Cornwall (1925), 25.

123. 123. Salmon, Heart of the West (1922), 13–14.

124. 124. Manias, ‘Our Iberian Forefathers’.

125. 125. For the introduction to Beddoe’s method, and the ‘Index of Nigrescence’, see Beddoe, Races of Britain (1885), 2–8. For other, concise, summaries of Beddoe’s work, see L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot, 1971), 19–20; and Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, 192–3.

126. 126. A. C. Haddon and C. R. Browne, ‘The Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway’, read 12 December 1892, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1899–1901), vol. 2 (1891–93), 768–830, at 771–84.

127. 127. Haddon and Browne, ‘Ethnography of the Aran Islands’ (1892), 777.

128. 128. Beddoe, Races of Britain (1885), 267; also cited in Haddon and Browne, ‘Ethnography of the Aran Islands’ (1892), 780.

129. 129. Baring-Gould, Book of the West, vol. 2, Cornwall (1899), 334–5.

130. 130. Haddon and Browne, ‘Ethnography of the Aran Islands’ (1892), 826.

131. 131. Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), 209–10. Mitton, Black’s Galway, Connemara (1912), 210.

132. 132. John Messenger, ‘Literary vs Scientific Interpretations of Cultural Reality in the Aran Islands of Eire’, Ethnohistory 11, no. 1 (1964), 41–55, at 48.

133. 133. A. Collett, The Changing Face of England (London, 1926), 212–14.

134. 134. Collett, Changing Face of England (1926), 213.

135. 135. Collett, Changing Face of England (1926), 214.