Introduction

The British and Irish archipelago in historical and literary studies

The significance of the west in British and Irish history has been under-appreciated, in part due to the Anglocentric tendencies of ‘British’ history that predominated into the post-1945 period.² Those tendencies became increasingly conspicuous in the twentieth century, when a series of developments made it more plausible to see the political union of these isles as a temporary condition lasting from around 1800 to 1922, rather than the culmination of an inevitable march towards integration and unity. The borders of the British state and its overseas possessions contracted with the establishment of the Irish Free State (1922) and the Republic of Ireland (1949), and through a process of decolonisation that made the United Kingdom a ‘post-imperial state’. From the 1960s the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, the advancement of Scottish and Welsh nationalisms (eventually resulting in political devolution in 1998), and the United Kingdom’s accession to the European Communities (1973) influenced a generation of historians who, as Raphael Samuel put it, no longer took ‘the matter of Britain’ for granted.³

There were several responses to this set of circumstances. Tom Nairn predicted the ‘break-up of Britain’, and Michael Hechter described the integration of the ‘Celtic fringe’ into the British state as ‘internal colonialism’.⁴ From New Zealand, J. G. A. Pocock called for ‘pluralist’ and ‘multicultural’ histories that were archipelagic and diasporic, spanning the ‘Atlantic archipelago’ and the Commonwealth.⁵ It has been noted that most of the historians responding to Pocock’s ‘plea for a new subject’ set aside the diasporic and imperial dimensions and have instead taken up the premise that, as Pocock articulated it:

the various peoples and nations, ethnic cultures, social structures, and locally defined communities, which have from time to time existed in the area known as ‘Great Britain and Ireland,’ have not only acted so as to create the conditions of their several existences but have also interacted so as to modify the conditions of one another’s existence and that there are processes here whose history can and should be studied.⁶

This premise was taken up by early modern historians, who emphasised the interrelated nature of events in the ‘three kingdoms’ during the mid-seventeenth-century wars and explored the lives of individuals who, as John Morrill put it, ‘thought and acted in a way that transcended the limitations of single-nation or single-kingdom history’.⁷ Hugh Kearney’s The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, first published in 1989, also demonstrated the potential of the ‘four nations’ approach as a corrective to Anglocentric histories and to the partition of British and Irish historiographies. In a sweeping account of what he called the ‘Britannic melting pot’ from ‘pre-Roman times to the present’, Kearney highlighted connections that crossed national borders and the cultural, political and religious divisions within each nation, and his book has continued to influence more recent attempts to revive ‘four nations’ history as a methodology for the modern period.⁸

Thinking beyond the confines of the nation also characterises Celticism, or Celtic studies, which traditionally referred to the study of the Celtic peoples and their cultures, literatures, histories, languages and customs. In the 1980s and 1990s, the ancient Celts came under scrutiny as some historians, literary scholars and archaeologists questioned their historical existence and their connections with modern ‘Celtic’ nations.⁹ Celticism came to be seen by many as a damaging and externally produced set of meanings working in a manner akin to Orientalism, through which the Celtic nations of these isles (Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales) were integrated into a political system dominated by England.¹⁰ However, since the 1990s, researchers in Celtic studies have found it more revealing to instead explore the ideas and meanings associated with the Celts, and how they have varied across time and space.¹¹ In any case, it has long been recognised that ideas about the Celts have been internally produced, too, providing material for the articulation of a wide range of identities, including political nationalism, and varieties of cultural nationalism that are compatible with the British state. In recent years, a small but growing body of literature has raised the profile of lower-case pan-Celticism (the often-overlooked transnational networks, cultural connections and shared sense of linguistic, cultural and racial heritage between cultural revivalists in Celtic nations) and the political aims of upper-case Pan-Celticism that gained momentum in the late nineteenth century, even if these movements ultimately remained subordinate to nationalism.¹²

The broad geographical remit of Celtic studies encourages the sort of comparative approach that has been advanced by literary scholars working in the field of Irish and Scottish studies and by those who are engaged in an emergent ‘archipelagic criticism’ that emphasises ‘fluid spatial relations’ when exploring the ‘literary geography of the archipelago’.¹³ This is a ‘plural and connective’ way of thinking about Irish and British literature, which draws attention to the non-English influences that shaped the work of Shakespeare and Spenser, and reveals what John Brannigan calls the ‘oceanic and archipelagic modes of thought’ that emerged from literary modernism in the work of writers such as W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Edward Thomas and J. M. Synge.¹⁴

Archaeologists have been thinking about oceanic and archipelagic connections for much longer. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Emyr Estyn Evans used the term ‘Atlantic Ends’ to describe the region of environmental, archaeological, economic, social and cultural similarities along the coastal areas of western Europe between Norway and Portugal. Evans also used the term ‘Atlantic Europe’ and borrowed ‘Atlantic Zone’ to emphasise that the western seaways had been undervalued as spaces of ‘culture-diffusion’.¹⁵ This idea was developed by Barry Cunliffe in Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (2001), who argued that the ‘Atlantic façade’ was the place to begin historical analysis, reversing the trajectory of land-based histories and arguing for the Atlantic seaways as ‘an axis of communication’ that, with the shared experience of living at the edge of the continent, produced an ‘oceanic mindset’ and ‘shared common beliefs and values over thousands of years’.¹⁶

Nevertheless, the significance of the west remains less well understood by historians of modern Britain and Ireland. Despite the development of archipelagic thinking outlined above, and with the exception of innovative work such as David Gange’s history-cum-travelogue The Frayed Atlantic Edge (2019), historians have typically examined western landscapes within their immediate national territories.¹⁷ Western landscapes are therefore often associated with national identities and (though not always) political separatism, and a vast historiography has demonstrated how, for example, the Gaeltacht regions – Irish-speaking areas of the rural west – were central to the Gaelic League’s spatial imagining of Ireland in the 1890s, and the romanticised Irish west remained the symbolic heart of the nation after the establishment of the Free State.¹⁸ Similarly, in Wales, political nationalism drew inspiration from Y Fro Gymraeg – the areas of the north and west where the Welsh language and culture had survived in the mountains, and Scotland’s north-west was the centre of Highland cultural nationalism, which, alongside Lowland Teutonism, represented the duality of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottishness.¹⁹ In England, the Cotswolds and Wessex supported an organicist version of Englishness in the interwar period, defined by its ‘Westernness’ against a ‘south-east metropolitan zone’, and Cornwall has also been understood as a place of difference which, with its distinctive national identity, has made it both familiar and yet potentially threatening to English unity.²⁰ There is no doubt that western landscapes shaped, and continue to shape, these national imaginaries. In addition, historians working to build national historiographies have enriched the historical scholarship of these isles over the past half century or so by moving the discipline beyond its traditional Anglocentrism.

Historians have also highlighted the complex relationship between national identities and the state. Following the lead of Roy Foster, historians have identified ‘varieties of Irishness’, some of which were compatible with loyalty to the British monarchy and with participation in the British Empire. This was a fertile middle ground, before the polarising events of the period from around 1912 made it seem barren in retrospect, and made it easier to forget that, for instance, the Irish nationalist politician John Redmond believed there was space for his Catholicism and Irish patriotism alongside loyalty to ‘God, Queen and Country’.²¹ Historians of Scotland such as Graeme Morton, Colin Kidd and Ian Stewart have also identified the multiple levels at which national identity was expressed, and Morton’s term ‘unionist-nationalism’ remains a useful way of highlighting that Scottish and Highland national identity often went hand-in-hand with the union, monarchy and empire.²² In Welsh historiography, Gwyn Alf Williams and Kenneth O. Morgan have shown how a resurgent Welshness in the late nineteenth century was successful because it was able to anchor itself ‘in variant forms of Britishness’,²³ and historians such as David Matless and Paul Readman have broadened our understanding of England’s ‘storied ground’, which could be found in the Scottish Borders, the Welsh Marches, in cities such as Manchester and London, in suburbia and in modernist infrastructure such as the motorway – in other words, in landscapes that are very different to the familiar hedgerows, fields, village greens, church spires and woodlands of the South Country.²⁴

This dynamic has been approached from the opposite direction by historians of Britishness. In his study of political and economic integration, Keith Robbins argued that the ‘blending of “the English”, “the Scots”, and “the Welsh”’ produced the ‘British’ in the nineteenth century, and Linda Colley’s eighteenth-century Britishness was defined by Protestantism, the monarchy, empire and war with France – unifying forces that were superimposed over national identities that continued to be important, resulting in the development of dual identities.²⁵ For David Edgerton, the welfare state and nationalisation marked the transition from an imperial nation to the British nation in the period after 1945.²⁶ In these works and in many others, Britishness is based on the industrialising and integrating economy, participation in the British Empire, and in loyalty to institutions such as the monarchy, and these sentiments are intensified during times of war.²⁷ Britishness, then, is thought to be held together by more recent glues, whereas the cultural, linguistic and ethnic foundations of national identity are generally conceded to Englishness, Scottishness and Welshness.

Given that the historiography of Britishness is concerned with the question of whether, and how, different groups of people came to identify with (or reconcile themselves to) a multinational state, it is striking that Ireland is often left out of the analysis. S. J. Connolly suggested that historians’ approach to the history of the United Kingdom ‘should not be overly dominated by the long-term failure to integrate Ireland into a larger political unit’.²⁸ We might instead ask, as Alvin Jackson has done, what made the union of 1800–1922 so durable that it lasted for well over a century.²⁹ In examining a variety of ‘Britishness’ that attempted to make room for Irishness, this book encounters the limitations of the terminology at hand. In using the term ‘Britishness’, the intention is not to suggest that Ireland is ‘subsumed within Britain’.³⁰ As is discussed in more detail below, the aim is to explore the complex relationship between Irishness and Britishness, and the role of western landscapes in providing metaphors for a pluralistic variety of Britishness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To quote Robbins, who returned to the complexities of Irish and British history in an article on ‘British Space’, my aim is to do justice ‘both to the particularities of Irish history and its place in pan-insular history’.³¹

Atlantic Isles

The present book examines the west as an imagined geography that transcends the national territories of these isles.³² It therefore offers an important contribution to the nationally framed historiographies of western landscapes in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The ‘four nations’ or ‘archipelagic’ approach is a necessary methodology for understanding the way contemporaries thought about the western places in Britain and Ireland and the connections between them. Without such an approach, the west fractures into four distinct areas, each enclosed within the borders of national territory in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and its broader significance is difficult to perceive. Atlantic Isles demonstrates that a transnational understanding of the western landscapes along the Atlantic seaboard flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. W. H. Hudson’s evocative passage at Land’s End, with which this introduction began, is representative of a much broader way of thinking about the west as a collection of places that shared certain environmental and cultural characteristics. In the west, geologists uncovered the most ancient layers of rock and ethnologists described the preponderance of older racial ‘types’. Philologists also looked westwards for the survival of Celtic languages, while antiquarians and archaeologists marvelled at the increasing density of megalithic monuments towards the Atlantic coastlines. Geographers explained these differences by dividing the British-Irish Isles into a south-eastern lowland area and a north-western upland area, and writers of popular non-fiction books, including travel writing, popularised the associational values of western landscapes for readers and also for tourists who explored the increasingly accessible west along roads, railways and steamer routes. So powerful was the idea of the west in this period that it constituted what I call a ‘westward gaze’ in British and Irish culture.³³

Exploring the west in this manner reveals two further insights for historians of modern Britain and Ireland. The first is that western landscapes were especially powerful spaces of modern enchantment. Those who travelled westwards described their journey to the end of the land, and once at the edge they continued to gaze towards the hazy, indistinct horizon. Being at the edge was an affecting experience that re-enchanted the modern world. Historians such as Paul Readman have turned to re-enchantment to explain how the practice of walking in the landscape exercised the historical imagination, and therefore provided ‘a sense of connection between the past and the ever-advancing present’.³⁴ In the west, travellers found that sense of connection with the past but they also looked back and articulated their anxieties about the perceived physical, moral and cultural degeneration brought about by urban-industrial and commercial modernity. Furthermore, an additional claim is advanced about the west and ‘re-enchantment’, which builds on the work of literary scholars Joshua Landy and Michael Saler. By their definition, ‘re-enchantment’ describes the deliberate and secular strategies that reimbued the world with a sense of mystery, wonder and purpose in response to both the disenchanting effects of modernity and the beguiling enchantments of modern media and markets.³⁵ At the western edge of the land, re-enchantment was found in folk stories about drowned kingdoms beneath the sea and in tales of mythical islands beyond the horizon. What made this form of enchantment distinctly modern is the role played by geological and archaeological research, which revealed that sea levels had risen, and areas formerly inhabited by humans now lay beneath the water. This research produced a new fascination with stories of sunken lands and elusive islands, which could not be dismissed entirely as fancy. Instead, self-consciously rational and sceptical readers acknowledged that the fantastical stories might be built on a foundation of fact, and this was a source of great wonder. Scientific rationalisation, then, was not simply a force of disenchantment as Max Weber would have it.³⁶ In the west, it was a source of modern enchantment.

Second, this book demonstrates that western landscapes were situated at the centre of a bold attempt to construct a narrative of historical, political and multinational union in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This variety of Britishness accommodated multinational diversity within the political framework of the United Kingdom, and it attempted to incorporate Ireland in its narrative scope at a time when the subject of Home Rule periodically dominated political debate. The pan-insular historical narratives of Britishness played out on three temporal scales, including geological processes measured by extensive periods of deep time, millennia of racial and linguistic developments indicating westward-moving waves of invasion and settlement, and centuries of historical conflict resolved by political union. As many contemporaries understood it, the west displayed in more concentrated form the ubiquitous ingredients that contributed to the makeup of the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh nations and of the United Kingdom as a whole. This allowed for the celebration of difference in a way that provided unionists with a resounding means of defusing separatist nationalism, which was typically based on notions of geographical, racial, linguistic, cultural and historical difference. This is not to suggest, however, that national differences were flattened or disappeared. At the same time, this variety of Britishness also offered opportunities for the vigorous assertion of national identity. In other words, the west was so important because it revealed the diverse layers that went into the making of the modern United Kingdom which, so the argument ran, was greater than the sum of its parts.

This insight alters the way we think about the west and about the nature of Britishness. The role of western landscapes in constructing national and separatist identities is well known, but what is less well understood is the attempt to produce a pluralistic version of Britishness that not only included western landscapes but drew strength from contemporaries’ perceptions of their expressive differences. Moreover, the fact that this version of Britishness included Ireland, and claimed geological, geographical, racial, linguistic and cultural roots, means that Britishness has taken forms that are both broader and deeper than many historians have hitherto recognised.

Such was the importance of the west in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that we might understand Britain and Ireland in this period as ‘Atlantic Isles’ – a term that brings together the central claims outlined above and situates them in relation to the historical and literary scholarship in which this book intervenes. ‘Atlantic Isles’ acknowledges the expansive concept of Atlantic Europe familiar to archaeologists, who have long examined historical connections that cross national boundaries. Moreover, ‘Atlantic Isles’ suggests that there are important insights to be gained from relocating discussions of the ‘Atlantic world’ to the British and Irish coastlines which, as literary scholars have recently noted, have not yet been ‘properly investigated’.³⁷ As a variation of ‘British Isles’, ‘Atlantic Isles’ defines this book’s geographical focus on Britain and Ireland without the former term’s implication of British political supremacy, and it evokes the direction of the ‘westward gaze’ in a way that the more generic term ‘archipelago’ does not.³⁸ ‘Atlantic Isles’ also indicates that the west explored in this book is a much broader concept than that implied by Celtic studies. Celtic languages, ethnology, archaeology and mythology were important ingredients, of course, but they formed only part of a more extensive set of ideas about the west which also embraced, for instance, geology, and the pre-Celtic ‘Iberian’ race. Finally, reaching the end of the land was, and continues to be, an evocative experience for travellers and writers, and this is suggested by David Gange’s poetic term The Frayed Atlantic Edge.³⁹ ‘Atlantic Isles’, however, better reflects the argument of this book that apparently peripheral regions were in fact of central importance to some of the most significant cultural and political developments in this period of modern British and Irish history.

Locating the west in time and space

There are, as this introduction has illustrated, a series of material and cultural characteristics associated with the British and Irish west. Nevertheless, the west is geographically vague because there are no boundaries designating its beginning and end. To take just one example, many travellers attached a great deal of significance to landmarks such as the River Tamar, which, it was commonly said, marked the end of England and the beginning of Cornwall, where the atmosphere of the west was immediately felt. But this was by no means a universally accepted threshold, and there are many other places, not least Devon, that are also unquestionably part of England’s west. For many other travellers, whether in England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales, the west was instead perceived as an accumulation of feeling marked by gradual changes in the landscape. Equally, the coast by no means marked the termination of the west. Stories of sunken lands, phantom islands and lands of immortality beyond the horizon were an important part of the west’s allure, and therefore the west has no clear geographical end point, either. It is important to note, then, that the west is not just a place or a collection of places. It is also an orientation, a direction. This book is interested in exploring the way people thought about the west from afar, how they felt its growing presence and described the embodied experience of travelling westwards, and in the imaginative power of gazing beyond the end of the land towards the horizon.

If the west transcends Britain and Ireland, and has no definable beginning or end, then this poses a practical challenge for the historian. In addition, sceptics of a transnational approach to British and Irish history have pointed out that attempting to highlight new connections beyond and between the conventional boundaries of historical analysis runs the risk of flattening differences and losing sight of the national context.⁴⁰ Therefore, I have selected four geographical areas of focus, one each within England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, which have been chosen because they exemplify the characteristics associated with the broader west, and they make feasible a detailed comparative examination of western landscapes in Britain and Ireland (see Figure 0.1). These areas were made accessible by the transport network, and they were traversed by a growing number of visitors who followed in the footsteps of travel writers and journeyed along the routes outlined by guidebooks. Furthermore, the four case studies provide geographical balance and they allow for a flexible structure in the following chapters, which are sometimes organised thematically and at other times consider each area in turn. In this way, exploring the west does not come at the expense of the region or the nation. On the contrary, it offers an opportunity to examine the relationship between regional and national contexts and the transnational British and Irish west. My analysis focuses on, but is not strictly limited to, the areas which follow.

The Isle of Skye was often visited as part of a longer tour of the Western Isles, the Highlands or Scotland, but its island geography, varied landscapes and historical associations meant that the ‘misty isle’ loomed large as a destination in its own right for travellers who journeyed ‘over the sea to Skye’.⁴¹ On board the steamer from Mallaig, the traveller called at Armadale and Isleornsay on the southern Sleat peninsula, and after further stops at the mainland ports of Glenelg, Balmacara and Kyle of Lochalsh, the boat returned to Skye at Kyleakin, Broadford, and the island’s capital, Portree, where travellers customarily disembarked. Skye’s sprawling wing-like peninsulas each had something different to offer the tourist, including the strange rocky landscapes of the Quiraing in the north, scenes of historical conflict between the clans MacLeod and Macdonald on the Vaternish peninsula, and Dunvegan Castle, seat of the MacLeod, to the west. From Broadford to the south, popular excursions brought travellers to the dramatic scenery of Loch Scavaig, Loch Coruisk and the Cuillin mountains, after which the traveller could continue along the steamer route towards Stornoway and the Outer Hebrides or return to the mainland by Kyle of Lochalsh.

Also demarcated by water is the second area, Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, which is bounded by the Tamar in the north-east and elsewhere by the Atlantic Ocean. Travellers who crossed the Tamar were chiefly interested in the coast and the far west, following the recommended guidebook route through Truro and Falmouth along the south coast to the Lizard Peninsula and Land’s End. Here, travellers wondered at stone circles and cromlechs, ancient forts such as Treryn Dinas, and dramatic cliffscapes that crumbled into the Atlantic in an ‘eternal wildness of granite and waves’, as the travel writer H. V. Morton put it.⁴² From Penzance, day trippers boarded the S.S. Lyonesse for the Scilly Isles, and colonies of artists gathered in Newlyn and St Ives. Returning home by the rugged northern coast (like Daniel Defoe), more dramatic cliff scenery and associations with Arthurian legends made Tintagel the place where, one guidebook claimed, the ‘weird enchantment of the scenery of North Cornwall can be fully realised’.⁴³

Unlike Skye or Cornwall, the Irish case study is an area in the west of Connacht that does not coincide with recognisable historical or natural boundaries; it is an area made coherent and convenient by the tourism industry. From Dublin, the Midland Great Western Railway crossed Ireland and arrived in Galway city, the entrance to the region. From Galway, the guidebooks recommended excursions by boat through Lough Corrib to Cong in the north and to the Aran Islands in Galway Bay where, on Inis Mór, the visitor could walk around Dún Aonghasa and recall the adventures of Firbolg heroes amidst the prehistoric cliff-edge fortress. The tourist’s itinerary proceeded westwards from Galway by long car (or, from 1895, by train) through Connemara to Clifden, past the quartzite summits of the Maamturks and the Twelve Bens. Then, the traveller went north through Kylemore and the mountainous landscape of Mweelrea and Croagh Patrick, and on to Westport overlooking Clew Bay. Before returning to Dublin from Westport by the Midland Great Western Railway branch line, the guidebooks recommended an excursion to Achill Island to see the Croaghaun Cliffs, and this trip was included in the ‘Connemara and Achill’ tourist ticket, which also covered travel from the principal towns in England and Scotland, steamers in Galway Bay and Lough Corrib, and cars between Clifden and Westport.⁴⁴

Similarly, the Welsh case study is a tourist region of north-west Wales that travellers typically approached from Chester. Passengers on the London and North Western Railway passed seaside towns such as Colwyn Bay and Llandudno before heading towards Bangor, Caernarfon and the quieter Llŷn Peninsula, which lay beyond the reach of the railway. Along the way, inland excursions took anglers and artists through the Conwy Valley and into the mountains towards the picturesque waterfalls and wooded Fairy Glen at Betws-y-Coed.⁴⁵ Further west, the road inland from Bangor took the hiking tourist through Nant Ffrancon, ‘an amphitheatre of … jagged splintered rocks’, to Llyn Ogwen and Llyn Idwal, where they might embark on an ascent of the peaks of the Carneddau and the Glyderau.⁴⁶ From Caernarfon, after visiting the Norman castle that in 1911 hosted the revived Investiture of the Prince of Wales ceremony, a popular excursion to Llanberis took tourists to the foot of Yr Wyddfa, which from 1896 could be ascended from the comfort of a mountain railway carriage.⁴⁷ Following the railway line south through Criccieth to tourist centres at Harlech and Barmouth, many suggested tourist routes returned eastwards, and passed through Bala and Llangollen before exiting Wales for Shrewsbury.

These areas of the west were also part of other, overlapping imagined geographies from locality to region, nation and beyond. Cornwall, for example, is part of the West Country region, and the Norse-Gaelic history of Skye makes it a place where the west overlaps with the ‘old north’.⁴⁸ It is also worth reiterating that the boundaries of these four case studies are porous; they are situated within a broader west, and they aid its analysis in a British-Irish context by providing areas of focus. Other areas might have been chosen. This means there are many other germane places within Britain and Ireland that lie outside the scope of this book. For instance, it was when analysing visual and literary representations of Shropshire and the England-Wales border that I first noticed the ‘westward gaze’.⁴⁹ The Isle of Man, regrettably, is mentioned only a couple of times in this book. Cumbria, primarily thought of as an inland ‘Lake District’, is also, as Andrew Gibson has shown, part of England’s ‘Atlantic edge’.⁵⁰ A Donegal case study might present a more complicated picture of the post-partition Irish west, given its proximity to Northern Ireland and its relative remoteness from the Free State. The west also extends beyond these isles, and this book’s conclusion discusses Brittany’s analogous experience of infrastructural development and the changing relationship with the centralising French state, travellers’ descriptions of going westwards to a rugged, wild Atlantic periphery, the enchanting power of stories about sunken lands such as Kêr-Is, and discussions about race, degeneration and anxieties about modernity. Far from being the final word, it is hoped that this book will inspire further research on western places and the connections between them.

The chronological parameters of this book (1880–1940) are also narrower than the interest in western places, which predates 1880 and extends beyond 1940. From the sixteenth century, ‘linguistic antiquarianism’ looked westwards for evidence of Celtic language survival, and from the mid-eighteenth century antiquarians translated the surviving manuscripts of Irish mythology.⁵¹ At the same time, James Macpherson’s influential Ossian poems – purportedly collected in the Scottish Highlands – caused controversy at home and inspired nationalism in Europe, and as the Home Tour grew in popularity travellers such as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, William Gilpin and Thomas Pennant were drawn to the upland landscapes of Scotland and Wales. From the mid-nineteenth century, readers were drawn westwards by English travel accounts such as Wilkie Collins’s Rambles Beyond Railways (1851) and Walter White’s A Londoner’s Walk to the Land’s End (1855), as well as Charles Kingsley’s historical novel Westward Ho! (1855). In Ireland, the Aran Islands were among the places explored by influential antiquarians such as George Petrie, Samuel Ferguson and William Wilde, and scholars such as Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold considered how French and British national character might be shaped by the landscapes, languages, races and cultures of the Celtic west.⁵²

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for beginning the analysis in the 1880s. By this time, the expansion of the British and Irish transport network connected the once remote places of the west with the metropolitan centres of these isles. No longer so distant and strange, the west was more accessible to tourists and was made familiar in a literary culture that described western places to a growing reading public. These developments expanded the geographical horizons of the nationally imagined communities in these isles, and in the 1880s discussions about the relationship between nationality and autonomy intensified as the Home Rule debates came to dominate British and Irish politics. In the final decades of the nineteenth century there was also an intensification of the transformations associated with the British and Irish experience of modernity. Rapid change was experienced through new technologies of communication and travel, suburbanisation threatened the rural countryside and urban areas were haunted by the spectre of degeneration. A sense of bewilderment, disorientation and dislocation from the past also motivated the search for re-enchantment in a supposedly disenchanted modernity.⁵³ In this context, the west became important in new ways.

The book’s endpoint is in 1940, but the political significance of the west began to break down earlier than that. The west remains a place of enchantment, but the connection between western Ireland and a multinational, pan-insular variety of Britishness was broken after the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and the establishment of Saorstát Éireann, the Irish Free State (1922). In Britain, the rise of the Labour Party accompanied a shift towards a more overtly class-based politics in the interwar years, and this period also saw the development of the planner-preservationist mindset that rose to political and cultural power after the Second World War.⁵⁴ Furthermore, in the post-1945 period the welfare state and nationalisation marked the transition from an imperial nation to a ‘British nation’, and British identity looked to the Second World War as the ‘mythic moment of national becoming’.⁵⁵

The arguments in this book are substantiated through an examination of textual and visual representations of western landscapes, including books, pamphlets, articles, maps, photographs, advertisements, paintings and poster artwork. Among the texts are works of academic geology, philology, ethnology, history, geography, archaeology, folklore, literature, sociology, as well as popular works and articles in the popular press. In these materials, ideas about western landscapes are articulated by a multitude of voices, and the west ‘migrates through regimes of value’. Western landscapes, like all landscapes, are a tangle of nature and culture; terrain that is ‘simultaneously a site of economic, social, political, and aesthetic value’, of cultural authority, memory, history and individual identity.⁵⁶ At the centre of these materials is an extensive collection of what can loosely be described as travel writing, where many voices and regimes of value came together.

Travel writing is one label among many denoting a diverse and rich literary culture that has been otherwise described using terms such as travel memoir, travel book, guidebook, travel story, travelogue and travel literature, which illustrate the range of characteristics that literary critics and historians have emphasised when dealing with texts that describe movement through space.⁵⁷ Traditionally, this genre was subdivided into guidebooks and personal travel narratives, which reflected the view that the systematic guidebook was, as Roland Barthes put it in a well-known essay on the Guide Bleu, a degenerate, commercial, prosaic and superficial agent of blindness in contrast to erudite, artful and literary travel writing.⁵⁸ The guidebook emerged in the 1830s and 1840s, when series such as Murray’s Handbooks, Black’s Guides and Thomas Cook’s Traveller’s Handbooks compiled maps and illustrations, suggested itineraries and provided practical information about hotels, bathing facilities, railway services, guides and excursions, leading the reader through the landscape with an authoritative tone that combined historical information with literary references. They were frequently amended with corrections and updated with new information in subsequent editions, and they met the growing demand of an expanding tourist market.⁵⁹ The difference between literary travel writing and the guidebook was, for Barthes and many others, analogous to the difference between the traveller and the tourist. Tourists, so the accusation went, were reliant on the guidebook for information and an itinerary which, along with an all-inclusive ticket, eased them into a period of passive consumption. In contrast, travellers possessed the knowledge, sensitivity and spirit of adventure to step away from the ‘beaten track’, avoid the crowded watering places listed in the guidebooks, and achieve an authentic experience that cultivated insight and enlightenment.⁶⁰

In recent decades, however, historians of tourism have shown that the dichotomy between the tourist and traveller, the guidebook and literary travel writing, is misleading and the lines between them are blurred.⁶¹ Nineteenth- and twentieth-century guidebooks were varied in their contents, combining train timetables and lists of steamer fares with extensive introductory treatises on history and geology, and ‘evocative narratives of place’ traditionally associated with the literary travel book.⁶² For instance, in its guidebook The Royal Route (1938), the David Brayne steamer company found space among the tables of prices and itineraries for suggestive descriptions of Skye’s ‘elfin shadows’ and the ‘savage faces’ of its ‘stark peaks’.⁶³ Moreover, travel writers moved seamlessly between the trope of the holiday and polemical commentary, between humorous anecdotes and treatises on historical or racial development, and between practical information and excerpts from well-known works by Wordsworth, Tennyson or Scott. Their descriptions of place could also become as repetitive and as formulaic as the contents of any guidebook. In recognition of this fluidity, I use the term ‘guidebooks’ to refer to systematic texts such as Murray’s and Black’s, and otherwise use terms such as travel literature and travel writing interchangeably to indicate texts that describe journeys to western regions.

The authors of these texts were predominantly middle-class, Anglophone men and women. Some of them were from the western areas they described in their travel books while others visited as outsiders. It has been suggested that women’s travel writing is characterised by a ‘less authoritarian stance’ that foregrounds personal relationships and the complexities of everyday life, in contrast to the ‘public discourse’ and ‘imperialist voice’ more commonly adopted by men.⁶⁴ Chapter 4 examines gendered descriptions of dangerous mountain landscapes and young women who were gazed upon as embodiments of archetypal beauty, but travel, by removing people from everyday life, also presented opportunities for expectations of all kinds to be subverted. Dora Benson advised her male readers on which routes through the mountains might be too dangerous for them, and Ann C. Colley has shown that the figure of the adventurous mountaineer was more accessible to Victorian women than has been previously thought.⁶⁵ Many male writers subverted the image of the explorer-hero for comic effect, and women also performed an imperial gaze on their journeys through the west, where their interactions with local guides were shaped by class as much as by gender. Broader changes in the form, such as the eclipse of the realist, instructive ‘heroic adventure’ and the growing use of dialogue, are observable in the travel writing of both men and women.⁶⁶ The sheer number of texts under consideration reveals the west as a widespread imagined geography that was connected to broader ideas about national identity, modernity and enchantment. In the following chapters the background of these authors is, at times, discussed. However, this book’s cultural approach to the history of landscape places less emphasis on the very detailed exploration of individuals associated with ‘landscape biography’.⁶⁷

By the late nineteenth century, a mass reading public purchased guidebooks that were frequently updated in new editions, and personal accounts of travel sold well and resurfaced in a dynamic second-hand market and in public libraries.⁶⁸ Beyond their popularity, guidebooks and travel writing are particularly profuse as historical sources because of the way in which their authors and compilers voraciously embraced the wider culture, and their value has not always been recognised by historians. In his article on guidebook representations of London, David Gilbert emphasised the importance of guidebooks in shaping popular understandings of places and cultures.⁶⁹ This can be applied to travel writing in general, which combined the wide range of interests that characterise early nineteenth-century antiquarian writing with the desire to produce comprehensive, detailed and accurate surveys that catered for travellers and general readers alike.⁷⁰ These texts shaped the experiences of travellers who repeated information from guidebooks in handwritten diaries,⁷¹ and influenced the thoughts of those who, rather than physically follow in the footsteps of the travel writer, preferred to, as the literary scholar R. A. Scott-James put it in An Englishman in Ireland (1910), ‘indulge the wild spirit of adventure’ from the comfort of the fireside armchair.⁷²

The travel book was, to use Jonathan Raban’s memorable phrase, ‘a notoriously raffish open house’.⁷³ These texts drew on older, canonical travel accounts while reaching out greedily to other genres and compiling, filtering and reproducing information for popular audiences.⁷⁴ Tales collected by folklorists were retold; dramatic accounts of adventure were illustrated by photographs, maps and advertisements; encounters with local people were described in a novelistic style of writing; travel timetables and lists of hotel charges found their place alongside extracts from famous poems and novels; and lengthy introductions provided political and economic observations, and summarised the theories of influential historians, geologists, geographers and archaeologists.⁷⁵ In their complexity and variety, travel books are an especially rich resource for illuminating the imagined geography of the west and its many regimes of value, and by examining their intertextuality it is possible to trace the movement and mutation of ideas as they were repackaged for different readerships.⁷⁶

Infrastructure, enchantment, performance, identity

There are seven chapters after this introduction, followed by a conclusion that reflects on the book’s arguments and suggests areas for further work. In Part I, ‘Infrastructure’, the first chapter examines the transformations that brought the west into closer connection with the metropolitan centres of Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century. This was a result of the expanding infrastructure of railways, steamer routes and roads, and the growth of the modern tourism industry. These developments are situated within broader nineteenth-century processes, in which European and North American nation states reached out towards their respective peripheries and drew them into expanding networks of national infrastructure. Drawing on travel literature, railway timetables, maps, advertisements and poster artwork, this chapter demonstrates how the west was transformed from a remote periphery to a holiday destination. In addition to infrastructural integration, these developments made it possible for the western peripheries to be imagined as part of a wider sense of Britishness, which is discussed in more detail in the final two chapters of the book.

Part II, ‘Enchantment’, introduces the ‘westward gaze’ through an exploration of the highly stylised descriptions of travelling westward. After physically or imaginatively gazing westwards in the direction of their destination from afar, travel writers described the journey as a departure from anglicised areas of the British-Irish Isles and highlighted the changes in the landscape that marked the transition. Finally, travellers and writers gazed towards the hazy, indistinct horizon from the western edges of the land. Once they had reached the edge, their thoughts turned to Hy Brasil and Tír na nÓg, two ‘elusive islands’ that are the subject of Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 focuses on the ‘sunken lands’ Cantre’r Gwaelod and Lyonesse. The chapters in this section argue that the west was a space of modern enchantment.

In Part III, ‘Performance’, Chapter 4 considers western landscapes as the setting for a series of performances, which involved escaping the beaten track, engaging the historical imagination, experiencing and overcoming danger and misadventure, and encountering a host of local characters. For many travellers and writers, journeying to the west was an opportunity for individual self-fashioning, where identities were inscribed in space. Chapter 5 considers how, as well as gazing westwards and describing their experiences at the edge, travellers also turned their gaze back towards home as they articulated responses to the rapid, destabilising and often bewildering transformations associated with industrial and urban modernity.

The final two chapters, in Part IV, ‘Identity’, explore how the west played an important and under-appreciated role in the way contemporaries understood the layered historical development of the United Kingdom in the years before the partition of Ireland. The Irish language articulates this idea in the word siar, which means to turn westwards and also to look backwards in time or space.⁷⁷ Chapter 6 focuses on the deeper layers of geology and race, arguing that geology provided a framework for understanding the foundational place of the west in the development of these isles, which could also be seen in the predominant ‘Celtic’ and ‘Iberian’ racial layers. Chapter 7 explores how the west became important to a multinational variety of Britishness, which was articulated through the unique contributions of western peoples and racial groups to a ‘British’ national character. This chapter moves the discussion on from the millennia of racial and linguistic developments to the centuries of historical events, to explore how western locales were recast as microcosms of the story of the United Kingdom. These were teleological narratives that attempted to describe years of war, resistance and struggle followed by mutually beneficial political union.

Notes

1. 1. W. H. Hudson, The Land’s End: A Naturalist’s Impressions in West Cornwall (New York, 1908), 58–60.

2. 2. D. Cannadine, ‘British History as a “New Subject”: Politics, Perspectives and Prospects’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (London, 1995), 12–28.

3. 3. R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London, 1998), 21–40, quotation at 37.

4. 4. T. Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-liberalism, 2nd edn (London, 1981); M. Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (London, 1975).

5. 5. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, The Journal of Modern History 47, no. 4 (1975): 601–21; R. Bourke, ‘Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History’, The Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (2010), 747–70; D. Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, The American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (1999), 427–45.

6. 6. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of an Unknown Subject’, The American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (1982), 311–36, at 317.

7. 7. Quoted in M. Coolahan, ‘Whither the Archipelago? Stops, Starts, and Hurdles on the Four Nations Front’, Literature Compass 15, no. 11 (2018), 1–12.

8. 8. H. Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2006); N. Lloyd-Jones and M. Scull, eds, Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (dis)United Kingdom? (London, 2018).

9. 9. M. Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke, 1992); M. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester, 1999).

10. 10. The connection between Celticism and Orientalism is discussed in W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History (Oxford, 1985); J. Leerssen, ‘Celticism’, in Celticism, ed. T. Brown (Amsterdam, 1996), 1–20.

11. 11. Leerssen, ‘Celticism’, 3–4.

12. 12. D. G. Williams, ‘Celticism’, in Late Victorian into Modern, ed. L. Marcus, M. Mendelssohn, K. Shepherd-Barr (Oxford, 2016), 69–82; D. G. Williams, ‘Another Lost Cause? Pan-Celticism, Race and Language’, Irish Studies Review 17, no. 1 (2009), 89–101; I. Stewart, ‘Celticism and the Four Nations in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (dis)United Kingdom?, eds. N. Lloyd-Jones and M. Scull (London, 2018), 135–59; P. O’Leary, ‘ “Children of the Same Mother”: Gaelic Relations with the Other Celtic Revival Movements, 1882–1916’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 6 (1986), 101–30. At the time of writing, I. Stewart’s The Celts (Princeton, NJ, 2025) has not yet been published, though it will offer a detailed exploration of pan- and Pan-Celticism.

13. 13. N. Allen, N. Groom and J. Smith, eds, Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge (Oxford, 2017), quotations from the introduction; J. Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707 (Oxford, 2008); R. A. Barlow, Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms (Oxford, 2023); N. Allen, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast (Oxford, 2021).

14. 14. J. Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles (Edinburgh, 2014), 6–7; J. Brannigan, ‘ “Part of the Nature of Things”: Towards an Archipelagic and Maritime History of Literary Modernism’, Yearbook of English Studies 50 (2020), 81–94, at 82.

15. 15. E. E. Evans, ‘The Atlantic Ends of Europe’, Advancement of Science 15 (1958), 54–64; E. E. Evans, ‘Ireland and Atlantic Europe’, Geographische Zeitschrift 52, no. 3 (1964), 224–41.

16. 16. B. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2001), vii, 6–18, 554, 565. Cunliffe acknowledged the earlier proponents of the ‘Atlantic seaways’ idea, including O. G. S. Crawford, ‘The Distribution of Early Bronze Age Settlements in Britain’, Geographical Journal (1912); O. G. S. Crawford, ‘The Western Seaways’, in Custom Is King: Studies in Honour of R. R. Marett, ed. L. H. Dudley Buxton (London, 1936), 181–200; H. J. Fleure and E. J. Roberts, ‘Archaeological Problems of the West Coast of Britain’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 70 (1915), 405–20; H. J. Fleure and H. Peake, The Way of the Sea (New Haven, CT, 1929); E. T. Leeds and C. Fox, The Personality of Britain (Cardiff, 1932); E. G. Bowen, Saints, Seaways and Settlement in the Celtic Lands (Cardiff, 1969); E. G. Bowen, Britain and the Western Seaways (London, 1972).

17. 17. D. Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel (London, 2019).

18. 18. This is a vast literature, and just a handful of examples are given here: A. Beatty, ‘The Gaelic League and the Spatial Logics of Irish Nationalism’, Irish Historical Studies 43, no. 163 (2019), 55–72; J. W. Foster, ‘Certain Set Apart: The Western Island in the Irish Renaissance’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 66, no. 264 (1977), 261–74; D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA, 1995); P. Sheeran, ‘The Idiocy of Irish Rural Life Reviewed’, The Irish Review 5 (1988), 27–33.

19. 19. P. Gruffudd, ‘Remaking Wales: Nation-building and the Geographical Imagination, 1925–50’, Political Geography 14, no. 3 (1995), 219–39; C. Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition’, 1780–1880’, The Scottish Historical Review 74, no. 197 (1995), 45–68; C. Harvie, ‘Anglo-Saxons into Celts: The Scottish Intellectuals 1760–1930’, in Celticism, ed. T. Brown (Amsterdam, 1996), 231–56.

20. 20. D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998), 15–18, 129–30; S. Trower, Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall (Manchester, 2015).

21. 21. J. McConnel, ‘John Redmond and Irish Catholic Loyalism’, The English Historical Review 125, no. 512 (2010), 83–111, quotation at 110; R. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English history (London, 1993), chapter 2; C. Reid, The Lost World of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutionalism and Cultural Politics, 1864–1950 (Manchester, 2011). For identity and the state in independent Ireland, see I. Milne and I. D’Alton, eds, Protestant and Irish: The Minority’s Search for a Place in Independent Ireland (Cork, 2019).

22. 22. C. Kidd, ‘Race, Empire, and the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Nationhood’, The Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (2003), 873–92, at 876; Graeme Morton, Unionist Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 (East Linton, 1999); J. M. Mackenzie and T. Devine, eds, Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011); I. Stewart, ‘Of Crofters, Celts and Claymores: The Celtic Magazine and the Highland Cultural Nationalist Movement, 1875–88’, Historical Research 89, no. 243 (2016), 88–113.

23. 23. G. Williams, The Welsh in Their History (London, 1982), p. 194; K. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980 (Oxford, 1981).

24. 24. P. Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2019); D. Matless, About England (London, 2023). For the South Country, see A. Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, ed. R. Colls and P. Dodd (London, 2014 [1986]), 85–111.

25. 25. K. Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain: Integration and Diversity (Oxford, 1988), quotation at 2; L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 2014 [1992]). In contrast, it has been suggested that English identity was so closely tied to the British Empire that an English cultural identity did not develop until after 1880: K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003).

26. 26. D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (London, 2018).

27. 27. Also see R. Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000 (London, 2002); R. Colls, Identity of England (Oxford, 2002); P. Ward, Britishness Since 1870 (London, 2004).

28. 28. S. J. Connolly, ‘Introduction’, in Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland Since 1500, ed. S. J. Connolly (Dublin, 1999), 9–12, at 12.

29. 29. A. Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707–2007 (Oxford, 2012).

30. 30. The limitations of the available terminology are discussed in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer, ‘Introduction: The Enigma of British History’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (London, 1995), 3–11, at 5 n4.

31. 31. K. Robbins, ‘The “British Space”: World-Empire-Continent-Nation-Region-Locality: A Historiographical Problem’, History Compass 7, no. 1 (2009), 66–94, at 80.

32. 32. ‘Imagined’ or ‘imaginative’ geography is a term associated with Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York, 1978). Here I use the term in a general sense to denote the west as a collection of ideas that were articulated by ‘insiders’ who claimed the west as their own, as well as ‘outsiders’ extending a colonial imagination.

33. 33. This is an expansion of the idea of the ‘westward gaze’, which I first articulated in an article about the literature of Shropshire: G. Roddy, ‘ “Westward on the High-Hilled Plains”: The Literature of Shropshire and the Early Twentieth Century Imagination, 1896-c.1939’, Contemporary British History 33, no. 1 (2019), 28–51, at 38–9. For a theoretical discussion of the tourist gaze, see J. Urry and J. Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 3rd edn (London, 2011), chapter 1.

34. 34. P. Readman, ‘Walking, and Knowing the Past: Antiquaries, Pedestrianism and Historical Practice in Modern Britain’, History 107, no. 374 (2021), 51–73, at 62–3.

35. 35. J. Landy and M. Saler, ‘Introduction: The Varieties of Modern Enchantment’, in The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, ed. J. Landy and M. Saler (Stanford, CA, 2009), 1–14.

36. 36. M. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (London, 2009), 129–56.

37. 37. Allen, Groom and Smith, Coastal Works, introduction.

38. 38. The term ‘Atlantic Isles’ has also been used as a politically neutral description in, for example, D. MacCulloch, A History of Christianity (London, 2010), 333. The term ‘British Isles’ is discussed in Grant and Stringer, ‘Introduction’, 5.

39. 39. Gange, Frayed Atlantic Edge.

40. 40. L. Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (1992), 309–29.

41. 41. A lyric from The Skye Boat Song, the name of a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson (1892), and quoted in various publications including J. A. MacCulloch, The Misty Isle of Skye, 3rd edn (Stirling, 1927 [1905]), 49, 269–70; D. MacKinnon, How to See Skye (Portree, 1937), 14, 90; K. MacRae, Handbook and Guide to the ‘Misty Isle’ of Skye (Portree, 1921), 57.

42. 42. H. V. Morton, In Search of England, 13th edn (London, 1931 [1927]), 93.

43. 43. The Great Western Railway, The Cornish Riviera, 2nd edn (London, 1905), 78–80.

44. 44. J. Cooke, ed., Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Ireland, 7th edn (London, 1906), advertiser, 4.

45. 45. H. Jenkinson, Jenkinson’s Practical Guide to North Wales (London, 1878), cxii–cxi; G. Eyre-Todd, ed., Through England and Scotland by the West Coast Royal Mail Route (London, 1903), 75, 81.

46. 46. Quotation from M. J. B. Baddeley and C. S. Ward, eds, Thorough Guide, North Wales (Part I), 3rd edn (London, 1889), 102.

47. 47. Eyre-Todd, Through England and Scotland (1903), 86–8. Yr Wyddfa is also known as Snowdon.

48. 48. A. Byrne, ‘Imagining the Celtic North: Science and Romanticism on the Fringes of Britain’, in Imagining the Supernatural North, ed. E. Barraclough, D. Cudmore, S. Donecker (Edmonton, 2016), 131–48; P. Davidson, The Idea of North (London, 2005).

49. 49. Roddy, ‘Literature of Shropshire’, 38–9.

50. 50. A. Gibson, ‘ “At the Dying Atlantic’s Edge”: Norman Nicholson and the Cumbrian Coast’, in Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, ed. N. Allen, N. Groom, J. Smith, eds, (Oxford, 2017), 77–92.

51. 51. I. Stewart, ‘The Mother Tongue: Historical Study of the Celts and Their Language(s) in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland’, Past and Present 243, no. 1 (2019), 71–107.

52. 52. T. Robinson, Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (London, 1997 [1995]), 122.

53. 53. S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, MA, 1983); M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1983); M. Daunton and B. Rieger, eds, Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford, 2001).

54. 54. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 239–357.

55. 55. Edgerton, Rise and Fall, xx–xxi; P. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York, 2005), 87–95.

56. 56. Quotations from Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 28–30; also see D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge, 1988); S. Daniels, ‘Marxism, Culture and the Duplicity of Landscape’, in New Models in Geography, ed. R. Peet and N. Thrift (London, 1989), vol. 2, 196–220.

57. 57. For instance, Paul Fussell defined travel books as a ‘sub-species of memoir’ in Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York, 1980), 203. Jan Borm used the term ‘travel literature’ to emphasise ‘the literary at work in travel writing’ in ‘Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology’, in Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. G. Hooper and T. Youngs (Abingdon, 2004), 13–26, at 13–15. For a summary of some theoretical approaches to travel writing, see M. B. Campbell, ‘Travel Writing and Its Theory’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. P. Hulme and T. Youngs (Cambridge, 2002), 261–78.

58. 58. R. Barthes, ‘The Blue Guide’, in Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (London, 2000), 74–7, at 76. This is also discussed in D. Gilbert, ‘ “London In All Its Glory – Or How to Enjoy London”: Guidebook Representations of Imperial London’, Journal of Historical Geography 25, no. 3 (1999), 279–97, at 281–2; R. Koshar, ‘ “What Ought To Be Seen”: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Germany and Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998), 323–40, at 324.

59. 59. Gilbert, ‘Guidebook Representations’, 283; Koshar, ‘Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities’, 323; J. Palmowski, ‘Travels with Baedeker: The Guidebook and the Middle Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’. In Histories of Leisure, ed. R. Koshar (Oxford, 2002), 105–30; D. M. Bruce, ‘Baedeker: The Perceived “Inventor” of the Formal Guidebook – A Bible for Travellers in the 19th Century’, in Giants of Tourism, ed. R. W. Butler and R. A. Russell (Cambridge MA, 2010), 93–110.

60. 60. J. Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford, 1993), 4–6; Gilbert, ‘Guidebook Representations’, 282.

61. 61. Gilbert, ‘Guidebook Representations’, 283; K. J. James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape in Ireland: The Commodification of Culture (New York, 2014), 11, 13.

62. 62. James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape, 14.

63. 63. For the description, see David MacBrayne, The Royal Route. The Isles of Youth. See This Scotland First (Glasgow, 1938), 19, and from 41.

64. 64. Discussed in S. Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London, 1991) 3, 21–22; S. Bassnett, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. P. Hulme and T. Youngs (Cambridge, 2002), 225–41.

65. 65. A. C. Colley, Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime (London, 2010), see chapter 3.

66. 66. 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 75; Mills, Discourses of Difference; Bassnett, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’.

67. 67. J. Burchardt, Lifescapes: The Experience of Landscape in Britain, 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2024).

68. 68. For a description of the second-hand market, see W. H. Hudson, Afoot in England (London, 1909), 1–2. For an example of a bibliography of travel books compiled by the librarians C. H. Hunt and W. T. Montgomery, see Bootle Public Library, Where Shall I Spend My Holidays? (Liverpool, 1906).

69. 69. Gilbert, ‘Guidebook Representations’, 280–81.

70. 70. M. Kelly, Quartz and Feldspar: Dartmoor: A British Landscape in Modern Times (London, 2016), 24–32.

71. 71. For example, see A Small Manuscript Notebook Diary Containing Details of a Visit to Ireland in 1905; 25 August–15 September 1905, National Library of Ireland, MS 49,503.

72. 72. R. A. Scott-James, An Englishman in Ireland (London, 1910), 3.

73. 73. J. Raban, For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling 1968–1987 (London, 1988), 253.

74. 74. Some oft-quoted examples of travel writing in the west include T. Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772 (Chester, 1774); S. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (London, 1775); A. Smith, A Summer in Skye (London, 1865); G. Borrow, Wild Wales (London, 1862); W. Collins, Rambles Beyond Railways (England, 1851); W. White, A Londoner’s Walk to the Land’s End and a Trip to the Scilly Isles (London, 1855).

75. 75. Academics often wrote travel books or contributed to guidebooks. For example, the geographer H. J. Fleure wrote an introductory article, ‘The Land of Wales’, in The Blue Guides: Wales, ed. F. Muirhead (London, 1922), xi–xxvi.

76. 76. J. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996), 2–5.

77. 77. T. Robinson Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom (London, 2012 [2011]), 380.