Escaping the beaten track

The beaten track, explains James Buzard, refers to spaces of tourism where ‘all experience is predictable and repetitive’, and all cultures and objects are inauthentic ‘self-parodies’.⁸ The popularisation of tourism led to the development of strategies to distinguish ‘true travellers from mere tourists’, and the ability to recognise and leave the beaten track became the hallmark of the traveller’s ‘superior emotional-aesthetic sensitivity’, which was set against ‘always assumed tourist vulgarity, repetition, and ignorance’.⁹ Visiting the places listed in guidebooks, which included information on ‘what nine tourists out of ten wish to see’, was therefore looked down upon by the traveller keen to establish their credentials as one who left the beaten track.¹⁰ Morton, for instance, ‘pitied those comfortable tourists who believe that Braemar and Ballater are the Scottish Highlands’, and Malcolm Ferguson recommended Skye’s ‘less known’ Vaternish peninsula – not mentioned in the guidebooks – to those wishing to avoid the crowded summer steamers and Lochs Scavaig and Coruisk dotted with yachts.¹¹ There was a beaten track in the far west of Ireland, too, and it took effort to access the places, as Harry Speight did, ‘unknown to the majority of British tourists’.¹² These travel writers were part of the self-appointed few who, as Eleanor Foster put it in her article ‘Off the Beaten Track’ (1894), went beyond the ‘show places’ and got to know Ireland’s ‘heart’.¹³

References to tourists clinging to the beaten path reveal pejorative attitudes towards a so-called unthinking and uncultured urban mass. The term ‘cockneyfication’ suggests the spatial and social dimensions of this mentality, which drove travellers in Ireland away from ‘tourist-ridden’ Killarney and towards less frequented regions such as Connemara.¹⁴ Mary Donaldson could, apparently, spot a ‘Cockney tourist’ in Skye by their ignorance of issues such as the ‘crofter question’, and she went in search of ‘Places of Unique Interest Out of the Beaten Track’, where the crofters were so unfamiliar with tourists that they either ‘retreated hastily’ out of shyness or ‘advanced on me threateningly’.¹⁵ At times, this language was mobilised by the self-professed ‘educated world’ against Americans, who were deemed by some to be ‘on a par … with the ordinary Cockney tourist, to whom nothing is sacred provided he can amuse himself by disfiguring it’.¹⁶ By the interwar period a more instructive tone emerged. As David Matless has shown, the enjoyment of rural landscapes by a growing proportion of the population resulted in the countryside becoming an important site of citizenship, which equally revealed the anti-citizenship of middle-class picnickers who left their litter before driving off in a motorcar, or working-class charabancers ‘making a racket and leaving their empties’.¹⁷ Vaughan Cornish (1932) and Edward Shanks (1938) grumbled about ‘town trippers’ littering, damaging hedges, pulling up flowers and leaving gates open, but this was often accompanied by the desire to educate and instruct.¹⁸ As Shanks put it, the tripper’s interest in the countryside was a noble thing, an ‘ancient instinct’ that ‘sometimes takes a crude and unfortunate shape’.¹⁹ Travel and nature books could, then, help to educate the population about appropriate behaviour. This was the aim of the authoritatively titled The Countryside and How to Enjoy It (1948), and rambling associations, youth hostels and other groups published ‘rules of conduct’, while motorcar and motorcycle clubs urged their members to ‘Leave no Litter’.²⁰ Writing in 1937, the environmentalist George Stapledon hoped that the development of a ‘proper network’ of paths, tracks, rides and hostels would help in ‘humanising and de-urbanising at least the more venturesome of the urban masses’, and would ‘begin to make some sort of a stand against the baneful influences of mass psychology’.²¹

In more accessible regions of the west, travellers had to be more creative to leave the crowds behind. One strategy was to go beyond the reach of the railway. In north Wales, this meant venturing beyond Pwllheli and down the Llŷn Peninsula which, according to the guidebooks, was ‘almost wholly unexplored’ and ‘entirely enchanting’, having retained an air of remoteness for the traveller ‘who wishes to deviate from the beaten track’.²² In Cornwall, the Great Western Railway terminus at Penzance left little room on the mainland beyond the railway. But from Penzance the traveller could catch the steamer to the Scilly Isles where, as Jessie Mothersole wrote, ‘no smoke from city, factory, or railway contaminates their pure air, or dims the brilliancy of their sunshine’. These were ‘virgin-isles, still unspoiled and inviolate in this prosaic age’, where ‘beauty and charm are apt to flee before the path of progress’.²³ Alternatively, avoiding the summer season ensured that C. Lewis Hind was the only guest at the hotel in Tintagel, and he waited until after sunset to walk from Sennen to the Land’s End ‘when the last of the daily tourists has departed’.²⁴ In popular tourist regions, escaping the beaten track was not simply a matter of where one travelled, but also a matter of when, and Morton used this strategy when visiting Helston for the Furry Dance, a folk festival that marks the beginning of spring. Whereas other interwar writers warned that the event had turned into a ‘spectacle’ for tourists,²⁵ Morton arrived early in the morning and took part in the Servants’ Dance with the locals, when ‘the eyes of the world were not fixed on the dancers’, so that ‘for an hour or so the spirit of Merrie England lived again in Cornwall’.²⁶

The guidebook became symbolic of the beaten track and mass tourism, and dispensing with it was as important as physically moving away from the well-trodden tourist trail. Hudson explained that, though useful, when overused the guidebook ‘comes between us and that rarest and most exquisite enjoyment to be experienced amidst novel scenes’. That enjoyment was found in ‘the element of surprise’, the ‘shock of pleasure’, and the ‘charm of the unknown’, all of which produced an intense emotional experience.²⁷ The expression of disappointment was an effective way for travel writers to signal that they were aware of the expectations raised by the guidebooks, and that they had experienced something rather different. Robert Lynd was disappointed on entering Galway when, instead of the ‘historic Spanish city with streets of courtly marbles’ and the ‘wild, fierce, and most original town’ described by Thackeray, or the ‘finely formed’ dark features described by Mr and Mrs Hall (1843), he saw ‘houses one might see anywhere’ and a ‘wrinkled old woman who sits huddled in her shawl on the pavement’.²⁸ Similarly, the author and journalist J. J. Bell warned his readers that other writers, ‘conjurers with words’, had misled people about Loch Coruisk, where ‘the soaring peaks do not actually overhang the loch’, and the surrounding steeps are ‘in no place impassable’.²⁹ The relationship between guidebooks, authenticity and travel writing was not straightforward, though. Experiencing disappointment might also be considered part of the travel writer’s stock-in-trade, and at Tintagel, underwhelmed visitors such as Morton and Arthur Salmon were more likely replicating Tennyson’s disappointment at the ruins during his visit in 1848.³⁰

Moving through the landscape

Travellers’ self-conscious descriptions of moving through the landscape reveal similar strategies of portraying authenticity while directing contempt towards others. The benefits of walking, for instance, were often set against the perceived alienating consequences of modern travel. Previously associated with poverty and vagrancy, walking emerged as a middle-class pursuit in public gardens and in the countryside, where pedestrians went in search of the sublime and picturesque, antiquities and geological formations, and an escape from urban life.³¹ By the 1930s countryside walking was also a working-class leisure pursuit, and some estimates suggest there were over 500,000 regular country walkers in Britain.³² For Hudson, walking restored the intimacy with landscape lost to technological innovations such as the bicycle and motorcar, which made the traveller feel less ‘native to the earth’.³³ Hudson was writing as part of a long literary tradition, built on the foundational writings of William Wordsworth, and expanded by writers such as William Hazlitt, Henry David Thoreau, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, G. M. Trevelyan and Edward Thomas. For Hudson and many others, walking was a primitive and natural way of connecting with the physical world, which in turn afforded the walker heightened powers of perception and thought.³⁴

There was a spiritual dividend to be gained, too. During his ‘Welsh Walk’ Edmund Vale described being on foot as producing ‘a sort of general feeling’ and ‘an atmosphere for my spirit to dwell in’.³⁵ For many walkers, its spirituality was connected to inconvenience and hardship, so that to approach Loch Coruisk by steamer was, according to MacCulloch, to miss the majesty of the landscape. Instead, he argued that the best way to experience the ‘grandeur of the mountains and the loch’ was to proceed from Portree by Sligachan on foot. By this method:

… every step of the way takes you into a wilder country; the savage mountains draw nearer; at last you walk under their shadow; you penetrate their depths; and for reward, after tough climbing, the strange grandeur of Coruisk breaks full upon your prepared spirit.³⁶

The gradual, grounded and wearisome effects of walking were an antidote to rushing – that great sin of the tourist who followed the crowd along the beaten track to see as much as possible in the shortest time. In the Scilly Isles and Skye, rushing was associated with day trippers from the mainland who, as J. J. Bell wrote, ‘cross over to Skye’ for an hour or so ‘just to be able to say you have been there’.³⁷ Mothersole was incredulous when describing the itinerary of a single-day excursion of the Scillies, which arrived at St Mary’s before ‘rushing off to the steam-launch for Tresco’ to see the gardens and Cromwell’s Castle, and then returning to St Mary’s ‘dead-beat, just in time to go on board for the homeward journey. And they call that a day’s holiday!’³⁸ One wonders what Mothersole would have said about the tours outlined in the Michelin Guide to the British Isles (1913) and Thomas Cook’s How to See Great Britain: Escorted Motoring Tours (1927).³⁹ Thomas Cook’s ‘Tour 53’ by private automobile took tourists through Llandudno, Caernarfon, Llanberis, Beddgelert, Ffestiniog, Betws-y-Coed, Llangollen and Chester – 135 miles in total. This was but one day out of fourteen in a breathless itinerary that began in London and reached Oban before returning to the point of origin.⁴⁰ This was the epitome of superficial tourism, the equivalent, for Edmund Vale, of the ‘pictorial post-card’. Both, he argued, give impressions of the land that lack ‘life or light or perspective or atmosphere’.⁴¹

However, properly used, the motorcar could also enhance travel, by liberating motorists from railway lines and helping them rediscover ‘the open road’.⁴² As Francis A. Knight put it, the railway and coach passenger was ‘not entirely his own master’, and the ‘old encampment, the cluster of grave-mounds, or the ancient cross’ appealed ‘in vain’ as the traveller passed by helplessly.⁴³ Michael Floyd’s ‘antiquarian eye’ was also aided by his motorcar, which allowed him to find ‘half-forgotten antiquities’ such as dolmens and standing stones, a ‘broken round tower among the trees’, or a ‘castle ruin on the far hill’ for which ‘you may often search on your map or in your guidebook in vain’.⁴⁴ Far from a departure from earlier forms of travel, the motorcar was associated with a revival of the old road, which allowed Thomas D. Murphy to learn things about the country and its people ‘that can hardly be attained in any other way’.⁴⁵ Writing in 1926 and looking back on the early days of motoring, A. G. Bradley wrote about roads as ‘a sort of historic relic’, where the ‘sentiment of the old coaching period lay thick’ and ‘the romance of old times still lingered’.⁴⁶

In fact, motoring was like pedestrianism, in that old rough roads were preferable to the new ‘polished tarred surface’ because they produced a strenuous and gratifying sense of adventure.⁴⁷ Floyd explained that the ‘rough lonely road’ between Recess and Kylemore passed between the Maamturks and the Twelve Bens, reducing him to a ‘bumpy crawl’ that ‘gives you the leisure to drink in the beauty of the mountains on either hand in slow draughts’. The slower pace heightened Floyd’s perception of ‘the real loneliness of the way’ and the ‘primeval simplicity of the landscape’, and he thought it would be a pity if the track were ‘replaced by a broad concrete affair up which you can race at fifty’.⁴⁸

There can be no simple summary of the various and contradictory opinions on motoring that appeared in travel writing. Complaints about motorists generally grew alongside motorcar ownership, though. Bradley’s time in ‘quiet and serene’ Llangollen was interrupted by the ‘hoot of the motor’, and in 1927 MacCulloch grumbled about the ‘petrol-driven vehicles’ that ‘now rush about’ in ‘great numbers’ on newly built roads crossing Skye.⁴⁹ S. G. Bayne, who travelled through Donegal and Connemara on a jaunting car, was nearly run off the road by a reckless motorist who ‘approached us at speed’, while Mais and Floyd also complained about motorbuses ‘charging across the country at such breakneck speeds’.⁵⁰ At the same time, however, Floyd thought Ireland was a ‘paradise’ because there were ‘with a few minor exceptions, no tiresome speed limits’, meaning that on the road between Galway and Clifden ‘the motorist may keep his foot hard on the accelerator all the time’,⁵¹ and Kenneth MacRae argued, in contrast to MacCulloch, that being able to approach Loch Coruisk by motor and boat was preferable to ‘the fatigue of a trudge over the moors’.⁵² To those worried about ‘the raucous clamour of mechanical transport’, Hugh Quigley responded by pointing out that the Scottish Highlands were ‘so imposing in their magnificence’ that they could ‘absorb this type of activity with ease’.⁵³ The ambivalent attitudes towards motor travel are personified by H. V. Morton, who conducted his search for old villages and thatched roofs from behind the steering-wheel of his Bullnose Morris. A vehicle of liberation in the hands of the conscientious traveller, motorcars could also be agents of superficiality in the hands of tourists. Discussions about motoring are characteristic of what Rieger and Daunton describe as ‘ambiguous evaluations of the present’, which allowed travellers to use the rhetoric of the modern and appropriate certain ‘aspects of the age’ while ‘selectively rejecting others’.⁵⁴

The historical imagination

Rural landscapes were widely thought of as spaces where intimate links with the preindustrial past had been preserved. Walking through the landscape could trigger historical insight, offered opportunities to find the essence of the national spirit in the dances and songs of the folk, and aerial photography revealed residual traces of historical villages and fortifications. This was a ‘recoverable past’.⁵⁵ The west offered an especially rewarding experience because it was thought that, as one went westwards, the traces of the past became older. The idea that the past has a direction is familiar to Irish speakers, who understand that siar means ‘westwards or backwards in time and space’.⁵⁶ As noted in Chapter 2, Eiluned and Peter Lewis described going ‘backwards, as well as westwards’ to Wales, and Alexander Smith claimed that to visit Skye ‘is to turn your back on the present and walk into antiquity’. The recurrent westward orientation of the historical imagination was often combined with descriptions of what Smith called a ‘spiritual atmosphere … a ghostly something in the air of the imagination’.⁵⁷ In such passages travel writing borrowed literary techniques more commonly associated with Gothic fiction and the Celtic Revival novel, in which ruined castles in the west were eerie settings of ‘temporal distortion’ that blurred the distinction between past and present, and called forth what W. F. Wakeman called ‘phantoms of the past’.⁵⁸ Chapters 6 and 7 examine in more detail contemporary understandings of the historical west, where geologists found the most ancient layers of rock, ethnologists claimed to spot traces of prehistoric racial types and philologists upheld grand narratives of westward migration by investigating the historic movement and contemporary survival of Celtic languages.

The archaeological record made the prehistoric past more tangible in the west, where the megalithic culture of the Atlantic seaboard enticed historically minded travellers to see what Murray’s Cornwall (1879) described as remnants of ‘a race driven to bay at the extreme corner of their country’.⁵⁹ This was a dim and distant past that stirred T. O. Russell’s historical imagination on the Aran Islands, where he was deeply affected by the ‘ancient and gigantic cyclopean remains’ of ‘some pre-historic race’. One of the fortresses, Dún Conor, stretched 200 metres in length, with ‘treble walls’ up to 20 feet high and 18 feet thick.⁶⁰ Russell continued:

There is something awfully grand and grim in the aspect of these ruined fortresses. To gaze on their colossal dimensions and barbaric rudeness seems to carry us back almost to the beginning of time, when the earth was inhabited by beings unlike ourselves.⁶¹

The historical imagination also offered travel writers the opportunity to distinguish between their ability to evoke this intellectual, sensitive and exclusive cultural practice, and the deficiencies of the unthinking tourist. Wakeman made it clear that only the tourist ‘of archaeological proclivities’ would be able to look upon ‘moss-grown and grey lichen-clad’ Aughnanure Castle, in Connemara, and imagine it as ‘the home of the Irish chieftain of by-gone days’.⁶² The ‘urge to delineate’, to use Buzard’s term, was perhaps more keenly felt in north Wales and Cornwall, where stone circles, tumuli, promenades and golf courses could be found in close proximity.⁶³ Most tourists, Mais moaned, ‘don’t see Cornwall at all’ because they ‘laze in deck-chairs on the sands or promenade’ at Penzance and St Ives. If they only took notice of the cairns, stone crosses and cromlechs, they might recall ‘legends, superstitions and traditions’, see ‘Phoenician miners, weighted down with their treasure of tin’, and watch ‘the last desperate stand of the British’ against Athelstan.⁶⁴ Similarly, at Conwy Castle, Morton pitied the visitors from Llandudno, the nearby resort town, who ‘roam vaguely on the walls, trying hard to understand Conwy’s place in history, feeling that, like all old dead things that have influenced the present, it is important but dim and elusive’. Their experience is, ultimately, a disappointing one because instead of conjuring ‘the men and women who fought and suffered, failed or succeeded within these mighty walls’, they are left looking at ‘something that might once have been a kitchen’.⁶⁵ They were well intentioned but unable to recall the past, and as unimaginative tourists their lack of historical vision served as a useful foil for Morton as an informed and perceptive traveller.

Danger and misadventure

Much like the historical imagination, northern and western regions of the British-Irish Isles were especially well suited to the traveller’s attempts to adopt the persona of the adventurer. In their descriptions of desolate mountains, precipitous cliffs and wild seascapes, travellers adopted the language and imagery of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), and valorised discomfort, danger, accidents and narrow escapes. Travel writing was packed with anecdotes of misadventure as travellers sought to emulate what Carl Thompson describes as the ‘cultural and existential prestige upon seemingly disagreeable and undesirable travel experiences’ popularised by the likes of Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley.⁶⁶

In particular, Burke’s passages on ‘Terror’, ‘Obscurity’, ‘Power’, ‘Magnificence’ and ‘Colour’ provided a set of descriptive terms and aesthetic principles to convey the excitement of pain, danger and horror, which caused ‘delight’ when experienced at the appropriate magnitude. The ‘terror’, ‘violence’, ‘fear’, ‘profusion’ and ‘danger’ of the sublime prioritised ‘dark’ and ‘gloomy’ phenomena such as a ‘cloudy sky’ over a blue one, and bare rugged mountains over those ‘covered with a shining green turf’.⁶⁷ Burkean language shaped travellers’ descriptions of the Cuillin mountains, those ‘gloomy glories of Skye’,⁶⁸ consisting of ‘black and frowning’, ‘rocky splintered precipices’ with ‘broken tops’, ‘serrated edges’ and crevices ‘like gashes in their sheer faces’.⁶⁹ Around each corner Quigley saw ‘another wild ridge’ with ‘threatening imminence’, and caught ‘giddy glimpses’ of high mountains.⁷⁰ At Loch Scavaig, a ‘dread place’, J. J. Bell felt an atmosphere of ‘horror’ below the mountains,⁷¹ and in the north, the precipice known as ‘the Old Man of Storr’ rose to a ‘giddy height’ among a ‘series of ghostly pinnacles, broken and weather-worn’. This was a violent scene of ‘weird desolation’, where ‘shattered rocks’ lay in the ravine below.⁷² Separated by a ‘tortured surface’,⁷³ Tryfan and Glyder Fawr formed a ‘wilderness of rock’ in Wales’s mountainous north-west,⁷⁴ and the ‘barren’ and ‘rugged’ Maamturks of Connemara also conformed to Burkean imagery.⁷⁵

Using such dramatic language to describe British and Irish peaks required some explanation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Alps were well known, and George Mallory made widely publicised attempts to climb Mount Everest. In comparison, British and Irish mountains were, in Floyd’s words, ‘little more than hummocks’ and ‘warts’.⁷⁶ In response, travel writers shifted the criteria by which mountains were judged, moving away from measuring raw height and instead emphasising dramatic viewpoints, steep ascents ‘from deep glens or marshy flats’,⁷⁷ and the grouping of peaks in aesthetically pleasing proportions,⁷⁸ which showed beyond doubt that ‘the true character of mountains’ was to be found in the west.⁷⁹ Dramatic composition also trumped sheer height along Irish and Cornish cliffscapes. Cornwall’s granite coastline was, for Arthur Norway, ‘rent and shattered’ into ‘spires and pinnacles and minarets’, and Hunt contrasted the valleys and ‘almost tropical vegetation’ of the south with the ‘grotesque’ and ‘savage’ northern coast.⁸⁰ At the edge of Achill Island, Croaghaun was preferred to the higher Slievemore because it formed ‘a tremendous precipice’ overlooking the ocean thousands of feet below,⁸¹ giving the impression that ‘the rest of the mountain had been suddenly cut away’.⁸² Should further endorsement of Croaghaun be required, guidebooks noted that the explorer and imperialist Sir Harry Johnston and the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin rated the cliffs among the most thrilling they had seen.⁸³

Vivid and violent as they were, these descriptions conveyed very real dangers. Mist disorientated hikers in the Cuillin, and in Wales it crept ‘wraithlike from the corries’.⁸⁴ Mountain guides, the guidebooks warned, were essential for all but the most seasoned mountaineers.⁸⁵ Cornwall was just as dangerous, where a moonlight walk along the cliffs was made perilous by ‘sinister cavities’ opened by erosion, and in many places the sea made bathing and boating unsafe.⁸⁶ To drive home the point, some writers listed accidents or retold stories of recent fatalities. MacCulloch listed climbers in Skye who had slipped over precipices in 1903, 1902, and ‘a third some years before’. In the case of the third climber, MacCulloch described how two days later his ‘mangled body’ was found at the bottom of a precipice near the peak of Sgùrr nan Gillean.⁸⁷ The authors Edith Somerville and Martin Ross described a similar incident in Connemara:

[The hills] hid their heads and shoulders in the odious mist, leaving only their steep sides visible … It was on one of these hills that a tourist missed his footing last year in trying to get to the bottom faster than someone else; the heather clump broke from the edge of the ravine, and the young fellow went with it. They searched for him all the summer night, and next morning a shepherd found him, dead and mutilated, at the foot of the cliff.⁸⁸

Danger could be found in many places – Clifton Johnson was almost caught by the incoming tide while returning from the Cathedral Cliffs on Achill Island, and Alexander Corkey’s aeroplane nearly crashed after gliding over Croagh Patrick – but mountains and cliffs were unparalleled as settings for entertaining tales of misadventure and for cultivating the image of the adventurer-explorer, which was not simply an exercise in masculine self-fashioning.⁸⁹ Many travellers, of course, conformed to the masculine ideal as outlined by John Ruskin, who claimed in a letter written from Chamonix in 1863 that turning back from danger made one ‘weaker, more lifeless, more effeminate’, whereas facing up to it produced ‘a stronger and better man’.⁹⁰ In 1889, T. Pilkington White recommended the ‘formidable spur’ of Druim nan Ramh for ‘any future Skye tourist … ambitious to try the stoutness of his boots, the soundness of his lungs, and the toughness of his sinews’,⁹¹ and Edmund Vale relished facing up to the ‘snow and desolation and smoking cloud’ during his Welsh walk in 1914.⁹² This was an enduring idea that coloured Morton’s remark, in The Call of England (1928), that a man could only find out ‘how much of Hamlet, how much of Quixote, how much of Robin Goodfellow is in him’ when alone in the country.⁹³ As Ruskin made clear, masculinity was relational, and carried with it the implication and often the explicit assertion that dangerous landscapes were ‘not suited for ladies’, as Murray’s Scotland (1883) said of Skye’s mountains.⁹⁴ Similarly, at the base of the Quiraing, Watt and Carter wrote that ‘timid ladies and ladies’ men had better remain below and enjoy the scenery’,⁹⁵ and White noted that the ‘Bad Step’ (a tricky section above Loch Coruisk) also bore the alternative name ‘The Ladies’ Step’, which he considered ‘a fine touch of irony’.⁹⁶

However, as Ann C. Colley demonstrated in her study of nineteenth-century mountaineering, discussions of risk and danger were more inclusive than has been previously suggested.⁹⁷ This was certainly the case in the west, where many women cultivated the persona of the adventurer-traveller and asserted their expertise as mountaineers. Madame de Bovet’s ascent of Croaghaun, for instance, was a strenuous climb through bog, ‘up the bed of some torrent’, and involved grasping onto ‘clumps of heather that give way under your weight’. The reward for the ascent was a ‘narrow ridge’ and a wall of rock descending 2,000 feet ‘sheer to the ocean’ that was ‘breaking madly against this mighty rock’. Here, at the edge of this ‘giddy’ height, de Bovet shivered as she realised ‘that a single false step will precipitate you into the abyss’.⁹⁸ Even more dramatic was Elizabeth Pennell’s description of the mist that descended on her and her husband while hiking in the Quiraing. Keenly aware of the lethal danger, the pair ran downhill in a ‘mad flight’ that took them through bracken, over boulders, down slopes ‘as steep as a house’ and caused ‘avalanches of stones’.⁹⁹

Others, such as Mary Donaldson, preferred to face danger matter-of-factly. Donaldson’s experience of the Bad Step was ‘rough’, but she claimed that the guidebooks made a ‘great deal of fuss’ and in reality it required no great courage to overcome.¹⁰⁰ Elsewhere, in Harta Corrie, Donaldson slid down rocks and scrambled over loose stones without trouble, and on the way to Prince Charlie’s cave she crossed ‘desolate moorland’ where she ‘plunged indifferently into pools and across burns’, ‘squelched in and out of bogs’, all the while the rain poured.¹⁰¹ Dinah Craik, who won praise from Geraldine Mitton for her adventurous spirit,¹⁰² walked along the cliffs to the Logan Rock in western Cornwall in spite of warnings from some fellow tourists who suggested ‘You’ll find it a pretty stiff climb … ladies’, and kept her head when their guide took them on an ‘adventure along the line of rocks’ at Land’s End, ‘out as far as anybody was accustomed to go’ and where ‘one false step’ would have sent her ‘to the boiling whirl of waters below’.¹⁰³ More hazardous was Craik’s boat trip to the sea caves beyond Tintagel on a stormy final day in Cornwall. As they entered the dark caves, the boat was

rocking on a mass of heaving waters, shut in between two high walls, so narrow that it seemed as if every heave would dash us in pieces against them; while beyond was a dense blackness, from which one heard the beat of the everlasting waves against a sort of tunnel, a stormy sea-grave from which no one could ever hope to come out alive.¹⁰⁴

The trip was worth it, though. The caves were beautiful and the conditions were terrible, ‘[y]et with its terror was mingled an awful delight’.¹⁰⁵

Furthermore, travellers often differentiated between character-building danger and engaging in reckless risk. Smith and Hart proudly described their ‘growingly reckless short cuts from summit to summit’,¹⁰⁶ and Vale defied warnings in favour of the ‘nobility of independence’.¹⁰⁷ But Dinah Craik directly challenged these glorified depictions of risk, danger and masculinity. In her conversation with an ‘old gentleman’ in Cornwall, both expressed their disapproval of the ‘foolhardy bravado’ of young men, while at the same time the gentleman encouraged his own daughters to be ‘active and brave’ and ‘run some risk’ as they scrambled up the rocks of Asparagus Island in Kynance Cove.¹⁰⁸ The conversation between Craik and the old gentleman indicated a broader debate about risk that gained publicity in the aftermath of the Matterhorn tragedy of 1865 and played out within the Alpine Club in the nineteenth century, between the technical approach of so-called ‘gymnasts’ such as Herbert Wicks and the ‘more aesthetic and reflective approach’ of Martin Conway.¹⁰⁹ It was in this context that A. P. Abraham described his Rock Climbing in Skye (1908) as a ‘strong safeguard’ for the ‘ignorant’, but admitted that the ‘foolish’ would be unlikely to take his counsel.¹¹⁰ To protect readers of Burrow’s Guide to North Wales (c.1923), Mrs Dora Benson omitted ‘exceptionally severe’ climbs from her guide to mountain walks and rock climbs in the region, and debates about risk continued into the 1930s as the reckless assaults of German climbers on Eiger-Nordwand were condemned by British climbers as a deadly symptom of nationalism.¹¹¹

Interactions between hosts and guests

The traces of interactions between hosts and guests are invariably one-sided accounts, narrated by travellers who tended to emphasise their authority and agency throughout the encounter. This led an earlier generation of scholars to understand the interaction of tourists and their hosts as a unilateral relationship in which power was wielded by the outsider who acted upon the host society in a way that damaged the local culture.¹¹² More recently, however, historians have come to recognise that, as well as being exploitative, host–guest interactions are better understood as a set of dialogues in which power and agency may be unequal but are wielded by both groups.¹¹³ In his study of tourism in Killarney, Kevin James shows that hosts ‘exerted profound influence’ on the way this region was experienced by tourists, honing performances that drew in part on Victorian cultural stereotypes of Ireland, satisfied the expectations of visitors, and ended in ‘a request for loose change’.¹¹⁴ Synge noticed this on the Aran Islands, where locals played the ‘ragged, humorous type … once thought to represent the real peasant of Ireland’.¹¹⁵ Host cultures have adapted to new economic opportunities opened up by tourism, drawing attention to specific ethnic, regional or national cultural traits in a way that educates hosts and strengthens aspects of the local culture.¹¹⁶ To focus solely on exploitation and the anti-Irish attitudes of British tourists is, as Susan Kroeg has pointed out, to miss the moments when Irish hosts forged and also profited from their own ‘touristic identity’.¹¹⁷

Detecting the agency of the host means reading between the lines of travel narratives that were typically choreographed to highlight the social and cultural superiority of the traveller. To this end, the kindly, quick-witted, yet error-prone and uneducated host was a stock character, who provided comic relief while drawing attention to the narrator’s historical or literary knowledge. At Tintagel, for example, C. Lewis Hind’s ‘amusingly ignorant’ waiter struggled to carry on a conversation about Tennyson, and in the Hebrides Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell were entertained by two old men who had not heard of Dr Johnson.¹¹⁸ In Ireland, the American writer S. G. Bayne related several humorous anecdotes about the well-meaning but clumsy and ‘comic boots’ at the Slievemore Hotel, where, in absence of a racialised marker, Bayne’s use of phonetic spelling for the host’s speech signalled the cultural and social gap between them, in a light-hearted tone familiar to readers of Punch Magazine.¹¹⁹

The encounters were not always so one-sided, though, and travel writers were just as keen to relay interactions in which they had been pressured – often successfully – into parting with their money. Keen to display his awareness of the host’s mischievous machinations, John Higinbotham related a scene where, on the way to Leenaun, the horse fell and the driver exaggerated the injuries, ‘moaning out his dread of what “the boss” would do to him, largely for the purpose of increasing his tip, as we afterward ascertained’.¹²⁰ Now wise to such strategies, Higinbotham resisted another driver’s pleas for extra payment after two shillings were handed over, and sent him away, ‘grumbling but satisfied’.¹²¹ Bayne, who seemed to be continually fending off advances at the Slievemore Hotel, was offered the opportunity to purchase ‘priceless’ items such as stuffed birds and horns that the proprietor claimed were from Tibet,¹²² and on the morning of Bayne’s departure the boots stole quietly into his room and ‘soliloquised in a tender tone, suggestive of a tip if I should hear him’:

‘Sure, his honour is slapin’ loike a baby, an’ ‘twould be nothin’ short of a crime to wake him up this wet mornin’; I haven’t the heart to do it’.¹²³

The most direct appeal came from the young women, or ‘colleens’, who surrounded tourists offering woollen socks and other wares for sale. During his ‘Dash Through Connemara’ (1881), Nugent Robinson’s car was chased by two colleens for miles on the road between Galway and Clifden, their shortcuts through the bogs enabling them to ‘intercept the vehicle on winding roads’. When they got close enough, they ‘silently extended a couple of pairs of bluish-gray worsted stockings in mute appeal’, and the driver told Robinson that they would follow all the way to Clifden for a shilling.¹²⁴ Rather than eluding the hosts, succumbing to the pressure became part of the tourist’s stock experience in western Ireland. When faced with the peddling colleens, Noel Ruthven admitted he ‘bought largely of their wares’ during his ten day ‘Dash through the Green Isle’ in 1887,¹²⁵ and during his visit to the oratory of St Benan on Inis Mór, J. L. Cloud’s young guide ‘strove by every possible artifice and argument … to convince me that two shillings was the lowest possible sum I could offer him consistent with my own gentility and his services’. After giving him just a single shilling, the boy responded:

‘If you’ll add twopence,’ he said, ‘good luck will be with you; but if you don’t, you’ll be misfortunate for all the days of your life’.

Cloud gave in, handed over the twopence, and left the place ‘in some fear of this indefatigably mercenary child’.¹²⁶

The subtler but equally effective agency of the hosts in shaping the traveller’s experience was demonstrated by Nugent Robinson’s driver. Before the journey even began, Robinson described how he secured the ‘box-seat’ in the lobster-car for the journey from Galway to Clifden by ‘dexterously’ placing a half-crown in the driver’s hand.¹²⁷ Once they were on their way, the driver suggested a detour in characteristically rough Irish brogue:

‘Would yer honor like for to taste a dhrop av rale potheen?’ demanded the driver.

‘Where could I get the genuine stuff?’

‘Beyant here, at Garrybaldi’s – no less’.¹²⁸

In this scene, related by Robinson, the tourist’s authority is evident in the driver’s deferent use of ‘yer honor’ and in the fact that the decision of whether or not to stop at Garrybaldi’s small thatched cabin was his alone to make, despite there being ‘ten or twelve’ passengers in the car. Yet, the driver managed to divert the group to the rural inn, and they entered after ‘a short colloquy between the driver and the proprietor’.¹²⁹

Tasting poitín – the illicit whiskey made in the countryside – was a well-established experience for travellers in Ireland, and the ‘wild west’ was described as its ‘natural home’.¹³⁰ Much was made of the secrecy of the alcohol by the proprietor of Garrybaldi’s, and Robinson’s theatrical account described how ‘the “blessed lickker” was brought forth with much show of care and secrecy’.¹³¹ Most of Robinson’s tourist group ‘spat the mountain dew out, declaring that it was nothing but bad Scotch whisky’. Robinson ‘rather liked the peaty flavour’, but was clearly suspicious of the provenance of the drink, and only felt that he had sampled ‘genuine poteen’ when he secured a ‘golliogue’ at the hotel in Leenaun.¹³² It is unclear from Robinson’s account whether or not money was paid for the earlier dram of ‘poteen’, but it was customary to compensate the proprietor for his ‘naggin’ of liquor, and the driver probably would have been duly rewarded for bringing ten or twelve tourists into his bar.

Connemara was not quite as carnivalesque as Killarney, but there are many comparisons to be made. Robinson’s interactions with his driver were certainly subtler than the relentless hawking of the colleens and the pressure exerted by young guides, but they all constituted attempts made by locals to make their interactions with guests economically beneficial.¹³³ The experience of being cheated, and the attempts to resist, became an expectation for travellers in Ireland, which was exaggerated comically by Liam O’Flaherty in his Tourist’s Guide to Ireland (1929). O’Flaherty warned that ‘the tourist is at the mercy of every kind of ruffian’, and the ‘welcoming hands’ held out for the tourist are ‘for the purpose of robbing him of all he possesses’.¹³⁴ The hosts used the expectations of the tourists to their own advantage, to give the tourist the experiences of authenticity they so craved, while attempting to make this situation financially lucrative for themselves, and shaping in subtler ways the directions, detours and trajectories of the traveller’s journey.

Finally, old men and young women completed the cast of characters in the west. Old men were associated with local history, folk stories and superstitious beliefs, which only a skilled traveller could tease out in conversation. Bradley managed to do so when visiting Llyn Morwynion, the Lake of the Maidens, which was named after a dark Welsh legend that told of a group of maidens who drowned themselves after being raped. As he fished the lake, ‘rowed about by an old man from Ffestiniog’, this ‘bard’ retold the story and ‘saw great visions no doubt in the lake’s dark depths as we drifted over its rippling surface’.¹³⁵ On the Aran Islands, J. M. Synge’s knowledge of Gaelic gave him special insight into the local culture, and he listened to several stories told by Pat Dirane, the ‘old man’ and ‘storyteller’ who related his ‘experiences of the fairies’ and made Synge privy to ‘a secret he had never yet told to any person in the world’ about how to defend against them.¹³⁶ These interactions were jealously guarded by travellers, and when Lady Gregory visited the Aran Islands in 1898 she was frustrated to find ‘another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people’. The other outsider was Synge, who also ‘looked on me [Gregory] as an intruder’.¹³⁷

As Chapter 2 discussed, Alexander Smith enjoyed listening to the tales of Cú Chulainn told by the ‘old gentleman’ Mr M’Ian amid the ruins of Dunscaith Castle, and Donaldson extracted ‘a most amusing story’ from an old man who remembered the attempts to capture the ‘water-horse of Loch nan Dubrachan’.¹³⁸ In their encounters with old men and their stories, many travellers adopted the wariness of the folklorist, who understood that he might provide ‘pleasant answers’ or try to put ‘the too-inquisitive Sassanach off the scent’, as the Folk-Lore Society’s former president Charlotte Sophia Burne put it in The Handbook of Folklore (1914).¹³⁹

The authenticity of conversing with old men also extended from the historical and folkloric to contemporary politics. Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell spoke to an old man in Skye to gain first-hand information concerning the ongoing tensions between tenants and landlords. They asked the old man about the ‘crofter question’, who duly told them that he was a Land Leaguer, and that in the Glendale district ‘not a crofter has paid rent for five years’.¹⁴⁰ Touristic interest in the dispute over land control also enabled crofters to present an alternative image of being mobilised and well organised, which challenged gendered and racialised depictions of them as placid ornaments in the surrounding landscape scenery.¹⁴¹

The old man was the main source of information during these interactions, but Catherine Scott also explained that the Cornish housewife might be persuaded to tell the traveller about having seen ‘the pisky stealing away over the dewy fields by the first grey glimmer of light’.¹⁴² Age, however, seemed to be non-negotiable, as travellers emulated folklorists such as Jonathan Ceredig Davies, who was indebted to ‘old men and women’ in ‘remote country districts’ for his information on witches, wizards and death omens, while Marie Trevelyan also collected ‘lore and stories’ from ‘old inhabitants’ in Wales.¹⁴³

Both men and women romanticised the figure of the old man, but in descriptions of voiceless young women a discernible male gaze emerged.¹⁴⁴ Synge, for example, described an ‘unbearably sultry day’ on the Aran Islands, when the ‘sand and the sea near us were crowded with half-naked women’, and elsewhere he speculated that, when gathered together, the women of the Aran Islands were ‘as wild and capricious as the women who live in towns’.¹⁴⁵ Robinson’s voyeuristic gaze was drawn to the colleens, who he described as ‘bare-legged, bare-shouldered’, wearing ‘the scantiest of petticoats’, and collecting turf ‘which was to warm their dainty toes – ay, their limbs were moulded in the daintiest fashion – during the coming Winter’.¹⁴⁶ As Wren Sidhe has noted, descriptions of flirtatious women and sexual frisson also extended to the way many men wrote about the landscape itself,¹⁴⁷ and Stone’s experience of the changeable weather led him to remark that ‘Connemara woos you as a coquettish maiden’.¹⁴⁸

Aside from these overtly sexualised descriptions of young women in western Ireland, women were more generally gazed upon as voiceless beauties. Travel writers tended to comment on women’s clothing in Connemara and the Hebrides,¹⁴⁹ and Madame de Bovet looked upon a ‘pretty’ girl knitting in her cottage and, leaning ‘idly against the door-post’, looking out towards the sea ‘with her great dark eyes’.¹⁵⁰ The ‘perfect complexions, features, figure, and carriage’ of young women prompted travel writers to draw comparisons with examples of archetypal beauty.¹⁵¹ In western Ireland, Morton was struck by a girl who ‘was more primitive than Eve’, and who ‘had no idea that she was cast in the same mould as Helen of Troy’.¹⁵² Similarly, Dinah Craik described her guide on St Michael’s Mount as ‘perhaps the prettiest bit’ of the trip, and her grace was ‘worthy of one of the fair ladies worshipped by King Arthur’.¹⁵³

The women remained voiceless in travel accounts, though, as travellers gazed upon them and watched them work. MacCulloch romanticised working women of Skye who, he claimed, retained a ‘certain freshness which is not unpleasing’ despite the ‘excessive toils’ of their labour.¹⁵⁴ During her travels From the Hebrides to the Himalayas (1876), Constance F. Gordon Cumming also idealised the working women of Skye, who ‘can carry a fair burden for many a long mile’ and ‘across the steep hills up and down’, in a comparison with the Madras women who accompanied their soldiers to Bengal.¹⁵⁵ In contrast, Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell shunned the romanticisation of women and instead emphasised their poverty and back-breaking work. They described ‘old witch-like women and young girls’ who were ‘bent double under loads of peat or seaweed’. For these women there were ‘no smiles, no signs of contentment’, and only ‘a look of weariness and pain’.¹⁵⁶ At the same time, the silent and gazed-upon young women were also typecast as stereotypically consumerist, ‘whose eyes sparkled’ when the packman travelled into Cornwall and ‘offered to their vanity cloths and trifles from the distant town’, or when the ceannuighe (pedlar) arrived on the Aran Islands to sell ‘cheap knives and jewellery to the girls and younger women’.¹⁵⁷

Conclusion

Thinking about travel as performance sheds light on the ways in which identities were inscribed in space, and the rugged and dramatic landscapes of the west witnessed the traveller’s search for authenticity, which pervaded travel writing. In the west, these performances prized physical separation and cultural distinction from the tourist crowd and the beaten track. Moving through the landscape, recalling the past, experiencing danger and misadventure, and interacting with hosts were important parts of performing travel in the west, which revealed dominant narratives inflected by social class and gender while also providing the space for travellers to subvert them. This chapter has also shown that the encounters between hosts and guest were complex, revealing an unequal yet diffuse agency over the tourist’s experiences.

Many of these performances are common to travel writing across Britain and Ireland, but there was often a greater intensity of experience to be achieved in the west. The historical imagination was a significant performance in the traveller’s repertoire, involving expert interpretation of cromlechs, standing stones and castles, and this was especially immersive in landscapes that became more deeply historical the further westwards one went. Geography mattered, too, and few journeys to the western edge were complete without an account of the danger and misadventure in the mountainous uplands and precipitous cliff-edges.

So far this book has followed travellers as they journeyed to the edge, gazed westwards towards the enchanting horizon, left the beaten track to experience danger and interacted with hosts. These were outward journeys, both physical and imaginative, but travellers also turned their gaze back towards home. The next chapter explores how, in the west, travellers articulated their responses to the rapid, destabilising and often bewildering transformations associated with industrial and urban modernity.

Notes

1. 1. This term is taken from James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape.

2. 2. James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape, 9; T. Edensor, ‘Staging Tourism: Tourists as Performers’, Annals of Tourism Research 27, no. 2 (2000), 322–44, at 323–4.

3. 3. J. Adler, ‘Travel as Performed Art’, American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 6 (1989), 1366–91, at 1366, 1383–5.

4. 4. S. Kroeg, ‘Cockney Tourists, Irish Guides, and the Invention of the Emerald Isle’, Éire-Ireland 44, no. 3–4 (2009), 200–228, at 206; Edensor, ‘Staging Tourism’, 341–2.

5. 5. James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape, 3.

6. 6. Buzard, Beaten Track; D. MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 5th edn (Berkeley, CA, 2013).

7. 7. B. Rieger and M. Daunton, ‘Introduction’, in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, ed. M. Daunton and B. Rieger (Oxford, 2001), 1–21, at 7–8.

8. 8. Buzard, Beaten Track, 4.

9. 9. Buzard, Beaten Track, 4–5, 6, 80–81.

10. 10. Black’s North Wales (1897), v–vi.

11. 11. H. V. Morton, In Search of Scotland, 15th edn, London, 1931 [1929]), 256; M. Ferguson, Rambles in Skye, with a Sketch of a Trip to St Kilda (Glasgow, 1885), 85–6.

12. 12. Gray [Speight], View of Ireland (1885), 28.

13. 13. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), v–vi, 1; E. Foster, ‘Off the Beaten Track’, The Irish Monthly 22, no. 254 (1894), 432–5, at 432.

14. 14. James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape, 63. Stephen Gwynn described the area between Cong and Oughterard as ‘far richer in antiquarian interest than Killarney, and infinitely less tourist-ridden’; see S. Gwynn, Connaught (London, 1912), 20.

15. 15. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 130–31, 135, 436–85.

16. 16. ‘North American Scenery and the Yellowstone Park’, The Times, 16 August 1883, 3–4. To the contrary, Bradley labelled Americans ‘the most intelligent of travellers’ in Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (1926), 134. Americans were also highly valued as a lucrative tourist market. The first issue of Irish Travel addressed ‘complaints that Ireland has not been sufficiently advertised as a tourist resort this year in the United States’, and other issues provided itineraries of tours of western Connacht for American tourists; see ‘Notes and News’, Irish Travel 1, no. 1 (1925), 2–4; and ‘Tours in Ireland: No. 1 series – For American Tourists Landing at Cobh’, Irish Travel 1, no. 6 (1926), 126.

17. 17. D. Matless, ‘Moral Geographies of English Landscape’, Landscape Research 22, no. 2 (1997), 141–55, at 141–3.

18. 18. V. Cornish, The Scenery of England: A Study of Harmonious Grouping in Town and Country (Letchworth, 1932), 9–10; E. Shanks, My England (London, 1938), 76–7.

19. 19. Shanks, My England (1938), 76–7.

20. 20. Cornish, Scenery of England (1932), 11–12.

21. 21. R. G. Stapledon, The Hill Lands of Britain: Development or Decay? (London, 1937), 84, 90–92.

22. 22. GWR, British Tyrol (1906), 102.

23. 23. Mothersole, Isles of Scilly (1910), 3.

24. 24. Hind, Days in Cornwall (1907), 97, 158, 170.

25. 25. A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, Cornish Homes and Customs (London, 1934), 224.

26. 26. Morton, In Search of England (1931), 89–93.

27. 27. Hudson, Afoot in England (1909), 3.

28. 28. Lynd, Rambles in Ireland (1912), 15–16.

29. 29. Bell, Scotland’s Rainbow West (1933), 234–5, 240.

30. 30. V. Purton and N. Page, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Tennyson (London, 2010), 48; A. L. Salmon, Literary Rambles in the West of England (London, 1906), 211–12; Morton, In Search of England (1931), 101.

31. 31. A. D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1994), 10; J. A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York, 2004), see introduction; C. Bryant, A. Burns, and P. Readman, ‘Introduction: Modern Walks’, in Walking Histories, 1800–1914, ed. C. Bryant, A. Burns, and P. Readman (London, 2016), 3–4.

32. 32. Lowerson, ‘Battles for the Countryside’, 268.

33. 33. Hudson, Afoot in England (1909), 25–6.

34. 34. Wallace, Walking, Literature, 13, 15.

35. 35. E. Vale, ‘A Welsh Walk’, Blackwood’s Magazine 195, no. 1180 (1914), 249–70, at 258–9.

36. 36. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1927), 134–5.

37. 37. J. J. Bell, Scotland in Ten Days (London, 1934), 172.

38. 38. Mothersole, Isles of Scilly (1910), 8.

39. 39. For motor itineraries in the case study areas, see Michelin Guide to the British Isles (London, 1913), 105–6, 107–8, 124–5, 125–6; and Thomas Cook, How to See Great Britain. Escorted Motoring Tours (1927), 10–11, 14–15, 22, 29, 31.

40. 40. Thomas Cook, How to See Great Britain (1927), 14–15. For similar itineraries in western areas, see 10–11, 22, 29, 31.

41. 41. Vale, ‘Welsh Walk’ (1914), 257–8.

42. 42. E. Coulbert, ‘ “The Romance of the Road”: Narratives of Motoring in England’, in Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland, ed. B. Colbert (New York, 2012), 201–18, at 208.

43. 43. F. A. Knight, In the West Country (Bristol, 1896), 259.

44. 44. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 11–12.

45. 45. T. D. Murphy, British Highways and Byways from a Motor Car (Boston, MA, 1908), 5.

46. 46. Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (1926), 27.

47. 47. Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (1926), 27; Gold and Gold, Imagining Scotland, 124.

48. 48. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 63.

49. 49. Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (1926), 8; MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1927), xi.

50. 50. S. G. Bayne, On an Irish Jaunting Car through Donegal and Connemara (New York, 1902), 93–4; S. P. B. Mais, Oh! To Be in England: A Book of the Open Air (London, 1922), 10; second quotation from Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 10.

51. 51. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 9–10, 63. John Cooke also noted that there was ‘not the same stringency on the part of the authorities in the enforcement of the Motor Act’; see J. Cooke, ‘Ireland as a Tourist Resort’, in W. T. Macartney-Filgate (ed.), Irish Rural Life and Industry. With Suggestions for the Future (Dublin, 1907), 13–22, at 18.

52. 52. MacRae, Guide to Skye (1921), 39.

53. 53. H. Quigley, The Highlands of Scotland, 2nd edn (London, 1939 [1936]), 13.

54. 54. Rieger and Daunton, ‘Introduction’, 7–8.

55. 55. Quotation from K. Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, 1927–1955 (Oxford, 2007), 174–6; for walking and the historical imagination, see Readman, ‘Walking, and Knowing the Past’; D. Gange, ‘Retracing Trevelyan? Historical Practice and the Archive of the Feet’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 21, no. 3 (2017), 246–61, at 248–50; and T. Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (London, 1990 [1986]), 64–5.

56. 56. Robinson, Little Gaelic Kingdom, 380.

57. 57. Smith was quoted in A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to the Highlands of Scotland, 7th edn (London, n.d. [1931?]), 180.

58. 58. Wakeman, Picturesque Ireland (c.1891), 302; A. Tierney, ‘The Gothic and the Gaelic: Exploring the Place of Castles in Ireland’s Celtic Revival’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 8, no. 3 (2004), 185–98, at 185–7.

59. 59. Murray’s Cornwall (1879), introduction, 14–15. Also see Piggott, Burrow’s North Wales (c.1923), facing 49; also see Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), xxiv–xxv; Ward, North Devon and North Cornwall (1883), xv; Salmon, Cornwall (1925), 37.

60. 60. T. O. Russell, Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland (London, 1897), 392.

61. 61. Russell, Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland (1897), 393. For another example, at Dún Aonghasa, see Bayne, On an Irish Jaunting Car (1902), 110.

62. 62. Wakeman, Picturesque Ireland (c.1891), 302.

63. 63. Buzard, Beaten Track, 80–81.

64. 64. Mais, Oh! To Be in England (1922), 91–3.

65. 65. Morton, In Search of Wales (1936), 64.

66. 66. The Romantic writers in turn drew on Radcliffe, Shakespeare, Spenser, as well as medieval and classical literature. See C. Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 2007), 1–8, 11–12.

67. 67. E. Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful (New York, 1885 [1757]), especially the sections ‘Sublime’, 23–33; ‘Passion Caused by the Sublime’, 50–51; ‘Terror’, 51–2; ‘Obscurity’, 52–3; ‘Power’, 58–65; ‘Magnificence’, 72–4; and ‘Colour’, 76–7.

68. 68. A. R. H. Moncrieff and S. Palmer, Scotland, 2nd edn (London, 1922 [1904]), 163.

69. 69. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1927), 132–3.

70. 70. Quigley, Highlands of Scotland (1939), 67.

71. 71. Bell, Scotland’s Rainbow West (1933), 239–40.

72. 72. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1927), 32–3.

73. 73. Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (1926), 177–8.

74. 74. Burrow’s North Wales (c.1923), 75–6, 83.

75. 75. W. P. H. Smith and H. C. Hart, Climbing in the British Isles, vol. 2, Wales and Ireland (London, 1895), 165.

76. 76. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 2–3. For an example of this sentiment regarding Snowdon, see M. J. B. Baddeley and C. S. Ward (eds), Thorough Guide Series. North Wales (part I) (London, 1884), ix.

77. 77. Quigley, Highlands of Scotland (1939), 67–9.

78. 78. Burrow’s North Wales (c.1923), 76. Also see R. M. Jones, ‘The Mountaineering of Wales, 1880–1925’, Welsh History Review/Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru 19, no. 1 (1998), 44–67, at 44.

79. 79. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 2–3. For an anecdote about the Lake District, see J. B. Priestley, ‘Beauty of Britain’, in The Beauty of Britain, ed. J. B. Priestley (London, 1935), 1–10, at 4–5.

80. 80. Norway, Devon and Cornwall (1897), 300; R. Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England, 3rd edn (London, 1881 [1865]), 15.

81. 81. Shaw, Guide to the London and North Western Railway (1875), 152. Also see Smith and Hart, Wales and Ireland (1895), 158–60.

82. 82. The angle was noted in Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), 233. The dramatic description of the mountain having been cut away is from Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), 274.

83. 83. Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), 234.

84. 84. Quotations from Quigley, Highlands of Scotland (1939), 67–9. Also see MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 144. For north Wales, see Burrow’s North Wales (c.1923), 89–90.

85. 85. Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Scotland, 27th edn (Edinburgh, 1887), 440.

86. 86. Scott, Corners of Cornwall (1911), vi.

87. 87. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1927), 143–4. For a Welsh example, see H. I. Jenkinson, Jenkinson’s Practical Guide to North Wales, 3rd edn (London, 1883), 217–18.

88. 88. Somerville and Ross, Through Connemara (1893), 61.

89. 89. C. Johnson, The Isle of the Shamrock (New York, 1901), 197–9; A. Corkey, The Truth about Ireland, or Through the Emerald Isle with an Aeroplane (London, 1910), 45–7. For masculinity and adventure in mountaineering, see Thompson, Suffering Traveller, 5–8; P. H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge MA, 2013); P. H. Hansen, ‘Albert Smith, the Alpine Club and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995), 300–324.

90. 90. Quoted in R. Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: The History of a Fascination (London, 2003), 85–6.

91. 91. T. White, ‘Camped Out under the Cuillins’, Blackwood’s Magazine 146, no. 886 (1889), 211–22, at 215.

92. 92. Vale, ‘Welsh Walk’ (1914), 261.

93. 93. H. V. Morton, The Call of England (New York, 1936), 16.

94. 94. Murray’s Scotland (1883), 410. For relational masculinities, see M. Roper and J. Tosh, ‘Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’, in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. M. Roper and J. Tosh (London, 1991), 1–24, at 1, 13.

95. 95. F. Watt and A. Carter, Picturesque Scotland: Its Romantic Scenes and Historical Associations Described by Lay and Legend, Song and Story (London, 1887), 505.

96. 96. White, ‘Camped Out’ (1889), 219.

97. 97. Colley, Victorians in the Mountains, 101–41; quotation from 5–6.

98. 98. Mme De Bovet, Three Months’ Tour in Ireland, trans. and ed. Mrs A. Walter (London, 1891), 241–2.

99. 99. Pennell and Pennell, Journey to the Hebrides (1889), 142–3.

100. 100. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 143–4.

101. 101. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 123–5 for the cave; 146–7 for Harta Corrie.

102. 102. Mitton, Cornwall (1915), 67–8.

103. 103. Craik, Unsentimental Journey (1883), 110–16.

104. 104. Craik, Unsentimental Journey (1883), 142–3.

105. 105. Craik, Unsentimental Journey (1883), 143.

106. 106. Smith and Hart, Wales and Ireland (1895), 165.

107. 107. Vale, ‘Welsh Walk’ (1914), 267.

108. 108. Craik, Unsentimental Journey (1883), 71–2.

109. 109. A. Burns, ‘Accidents Will Happen: Risk, Climbing and Pedestrianism in the “Golden Age” of English Mountaineering, 1850–1865’, in Walking Histories, 1800–1914, ed. C. Bryant, A. Burns, and P. Readman (London, 2016), 165–94, quotations at 166, 191–4.

110. 110. A. P. Abraham, Rock Climbing in Skye (London, 1908), p. xviii.

111. 111. D. Benson, ‘Mountain Walks and Rock Climbs in North Wales’, in P. J. Piggott, ed., Burrow’s Guide to North Wales, ed. P. J. Piggott (Cheltenham, n.d. [c.1923]), 78–104; Burns, ‘Accidents Will Happen’, 166, 191–4.

112. 112. R. Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy (Philadelphia, 1976); V. L. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. V. L. Smith, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1989 [1977]), 1–17.

113. 113. James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape, 151–2. Some scholars have questioned the binary categories of ‘host’ and ‘guest’ themselves, recognising the ways in which these groups can overlap, and acknowledging the shared experiences of locals and tourists. See K. Sherlock, ‘Revisiting the Concept of Hosts and Guests’, Tourist Studies 1, no. 3 (2001), 271–95, at 271–2, 287.

114. 114. James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape, 61–2.

115. 115. Synge, Aran Islands (1907), 128.

116. 116. Kroeg, ‘Cockney Tourists, Irish Guides’, 207.

117. 117. Kroeg, ‘Cockney Tourists, Irish Guides’, 227–8.

118. 118. Hind, Days in Cornwall (1907), 97; Pennell and Pennell, Journey to the Hebrides (1889), 63.

119. 119. Bayne, On an Irish Jaunting Car (1902), 105. For the use of phonetic spelling in the absence of racial differences, see James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape, 73. For Punch Magazine, see C. Keene et al., Mr Punch in the Highlands (London, n.d. [1910?]).

120. 120. Higinbotham, In the British Isles (1911), 235.

121. 121. Higinbotham, In the British Isles (1911), 241.

122. 122. Bayne, On an Irish Jaunting Car (1902), 78–80.

123. 123. Bayne, On an Irish Jaunting Car (1902), 73.

124. 124. Robinson, ‘Through Connemara’ (1881), 281–2.

125. 125. Noel Ruthven, ‘A Dash through the Green Isle’, Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 22, no. 5 (1887), 373–82, at 381.

126. 126. Cloud, ‘The Arran Islands’ (1880–81), 511.

127. 127. The lobster-car was an ‘overgrown outside jaunting-car, capable of containing eight or ten persons on each side’. Robinson, ‘Through Connemara’ (1881), 280.

128. 128. Robinson, ‘Through Connemara’ (1881), 282.

129. 129. Robinson, ‘Through Connemara’ (1881), 282.

130. 130. For an entertaining account of a ‘poteen-hunter’, who took the reader on a trip to ‘catch men making it’, see ‘Poteen-hunting in the Wild West of Ireland’, Chambers’s Journal 2, no. 100 (1899), 761–3.

131. 131. Robinson, ‘Through Connemara’ (1881), 282–3.

132. 132. Robinson, ‘Through Connemara’ (1881), 282–3.

133. 133. For examples of begging, see Johnson, Isle of the Shamrock (1901), 158, 162–3, 165; and Synge, Connemara (1911), 160–61. For an account expressing surprise at the lack of begging in Connacht, see Stevenson, Charm of Ireland (1914), 375.

134. 134. L. O’Flaherty, A Tourist’s Guide to Ireland (London, 1929), 5–8. O’Flaherty also suggested the tourist might be charged by customs officers for ‘taking away on his shoes some of the country’s mud’.

135. 135. Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (1926), 90–91.

136. 136. Synge, Aran Islands (1907), quotation from 46–7, also see 17–18, 18–24, 33–5, 51–7, 62–4, 75.

137. 137. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (London, 1913), 120–21.

138. 138. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 112.

139. 139. C. S. Burne, The Handbook of Folklore (London, 1914), 15.

140. 140. Pennell and Pennell, Journey to the Hebrides (1889), 151–2. Michael Davitt wrote about attempts to extend Land League propaganda into the Highlands and the Isle of Skye, areas that were toured by the propagandist Edward McHugh; see M. Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London, 1904), 228.

141. 141. Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 176. Grenier, ‘ “Scottishness”, “Britishness”’, 1010. Also see M. Padget, ‘An Iconography of Difference: Internal Colonialism, Photography, and the Crofters of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’, College Literature 20, no. 2 (1993), 177–95. For preconceptions of crofters as ‘placid’ parts of the surrounding scenery, see A. Newby, ‘Land and the “Crofter Question” in Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, International Review of Scottish Studies 35 (2010), 7–36, at 7.

142. 142. Scott, Corners of Cornwall (1911), 87.

143. 143. Davies, Folklore of West and Mid-Wales, vii; M. Trevelyan, Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales (London, 1909), vi; for stories collected from old men in Wales, see 14, 67, 68, 122, 180, 106, 239.

144. 144. For the male gaze and tourism, see A. Pritchard and N. J. Morgan, ‘Privileging the Male Gaze: Gendered Tourism Landscapes’, Annals of Tourism Research 27, no. 4 (2000), 884–905, especially the conclusion, 899–901. For the ‘male gaze’, see L. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), reprinted in R. Warhol-Down and D. Price Herndl, Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009), 436–40.

145. 145. Synge, Aran Islands (1907), 50, 80. For further comment, see S. G. Mattar, Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival (Oxford, 2004), 136–7.

146. 146. Robinson, ‘Through Connemara’ (1881), 282, 285.

147. 147. Wren Sidhe has commented on Morton’s representation of the ‘feminised English soil’; see W. Sidhe, ‘H. V. Morton’s Pilgrimages to Englishness’, Literature and History 12, no. 1 (2003), 57–71.

148. 148. Stone, Connemara (1906), 2.

149. 149. Stone, Connemara (1906), 329; De Bovet, Tour in Ireland (1891), 208; Pennell and Pennell, Journey to the Hebrides (1889), 33.

150. 150. Bates, Gretna Green to Land’s End (1908), 370; De Bovet, Tour in Ireland (1891), 214.

151. 151. Stone, Connemara (1906), 328–9. Stone also quoted from Tennyson, Maud, and Other Poems (London, 1855), 101–13 when describing the beauty of Achill women.

152. 152. Morton, In Search of Ireland (1932), 186.

153. 153. Craik, Unsentimental Journey (1883), 102.

154. 154. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1927), 201–2.

155. 155. C. F. G. Cumming, From the Hebrides to the Himalayas, vol. 2 (London, 1876), 182.

156. 156. Cumming, Hebrides to the Himalayas (1876), 146–7.

157. 157. H. V. Morton, In Search of England, 21st edn (London, 1934 [1927]), 97; Synge, Aran Islands (1907), 125. For gender and consumerism, see R. Bowlby, Shopping with Freud (London, 1993), 62, and A. J. Hammerton, ‘The English Weakness? Gender, Satire and “Moral Manliness” in the Lower Middle Class, 1870–1920’, in Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800–1940, ed. A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (Manchester, 1999), 164–82, at 164–5.