Chapter 7 Varieties of Britishness
The final chapter develops a more focused analysis of how a layered understanding of the British-Irish Isles – and the importance of the west as the foundation – claimed centre stage in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about the political union. This chapter expands on the idea introduced at the beginning of Chapter 6, that, while the importance of the west in constructing national and often separatist identities has long been recognised, the west was also placed at the heart of a multinational and deeply historical vision of the United Kingdom in the years before the Partition of Ireland.
The first section examines the strategies through which the geological, racial and linguistic differences of the west were situated within the political framework of the United Kingdom. This occurred in debates about Home Rule and in discussions of national character. Travel and travel writing were outlets for a relatively benign set of cultural strategies designed to forge a coherent, multinational and historical understanding of the United Kingdom, the tone of which ranged from celebration and inclusion to ‘sentimental condescension’ and ‘repressive tolerance’.1 The differences observable in the west were celebrated as part of a unique contribution to a ‘British’ national character, which, it was argued, was essential to the emergence of a modern ‘British’ nation that included Ireland.2 This is not to deny the importance of national identities in Cornwall, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Rather, it expands our understanding of the capacity of western landscapes to support a wider range of views about nation, identity and the union. Like W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’ (1893), western landscapes could be read both ways.3 The west remained the place where the Irish, Scottish or Welsh nationalist could (and did) find the heart of their nation, but, as this chapter demonstrates, it was also the place where varieties of Britishness were located.
The second section of the chapter moves the discussion on from the millennia of racial and linguistic developments to centuries of historical events. In travel literature, the history of the west was consistently related to events of ‘national’ significance, which refashioned western locales as microcosms of a larger historical narrative. These were teleological stories that attempted to describe years of war, resistance and struggle followed by mutually beneficial political union. Cornwall’s past was written as a series of contributions to English and British history, and in the cases of Scotland and Wales, the bravery and loyalty that once fuelled political and military resistance were appropriated by the British nation, armed forces and Empire. The attempt to write Ireland’s history was trickier, because narratives of unification inevitably slipped into more recent and unresolved political issues. Instead of describing conflict as a prologue to settled union, travel literature expressed hope that the Irish question might soon be resolved.
The attempt to include Ireland in a deeply historical understanding of the British-Irish Isles ultimately succumbed to the Irish War of Independence and the Partition of Ireland, and the Irish west became the exclusive cultural heartland of the Free State in the 1920s. This outcome has encouraged historians to view both the success of Scotland’s and Wales’s integration into the British state, and the partial failure of Ireland’s, as somehow inevitable or predetermined.4 In contrast, by exploring the bold attempt to place the west at the centre of a historical narrative that transcended these isles, this chapter augments our understanding of its flexibility as a cultural imaginary.
Iberian Home Rule
The deep history of these isles, understood as an accretion of geological and racial layers, had important political implications in the 1880s, when the Home Rule debates intensified. As Chapter 6 demonstrated, the westward-orientated narratives of historical development explained that older geological layers were visible in the west, which was also where the Iberian and Celtic racial layers could be observed in more concentrated form. This provided a motif with which travel writers and guidebooks piqued the historical interest of their readers and described the difference of the west that was one of degree and not one of kind. On the one hand, the framework of geological and racial layers popularised the idea that there were deep foundations and enduring commonalities that transcended the different groups of people in these isles. At the same time, writers and travellers remained fascinated by the enduring expressive differences of the west, which were not so easily undermined. As contemporaries understood it, the expressive differences of the west revealed, in more concentrated form, the foundational layers that contributed to the makeup of the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh nations and also to the United Kingdom as a whole. As such, it was possible for national identities to anchor themselves – as Gwyn Alf Williams writes of Welshness – ‘in variant forms of Britishness’, while a strain of Liberal unionism attempted to refashion Britishness in a way that accommodated multiple national identities.5
The political potential of subjects such as racial layering and mixed ethnology became evident in a series of responses to Gladstone’s First Home Rule Bill (1886). The Bill, long campaigned for by Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, was defeated by an alliance of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, and the following year Liberal politicians clashed on the subject in a series of letters published in The Times. Sir John Lubbock, who opposed Home Rule and joined the Liberal Unionist Party in 1886, claimed in a letter published on 18 March 1887 that the adherents of Home Rule assumed there were four nationalities within the United Kingdom, and that these nationalities were differentiated by race. In refutation of this idea, Lubbock pointed to John Beddoe’s racial divisions of Britain and Ireland which, in place of neat racial boundaries coinciding with national borders, emphasised the differences between east and west ‘according to blood’. If nationality grew out of race, Lubbock explained, then instead of four nations there would be a ‘Saxon division’ comprising most of the eastern parts of England, Ireland and Scotland, and a so-called ‘Celtic division’ that might include Cornwall and Wales along with the western areas of Scotland and Ireland. In addition, a Scandinavian division would be represented by northern Scotland and ‘several maritime districts’ on the east coast and in Westmoreland, Cumberland and Pembroke, and, finally, south-west Ireland would be the district of the Iberian. Lubbock’s unusual new map of the United Kingdom was designed to disorientate the reader and undermine Home Rule by suggesting that any scheme of political devolution was fundamentally flawed. Even if one wished to make this thought experiment a political reality, Lubbock continued, determining the exact boundaries between the Saxon, Celtic, Scandinavian and Iberian divisions would produce ‘an endless number of bitter disputes’.6 If Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill was designed to resolve the conflict between Celt and Saxon, Lubbock’s letter suggested that it would have the opposite effect, ‘rousing race antagonisms’ that would be damaging to the United Kingdom and the Empire.7
Lubbock’s impractical racial divisions successfully made the broader point that altering the constitution would be a complex exercise, but his argument relied on the premise that the Home Rulers did indeed equate race with nationality. A few days later James Bryce, who supported Gladstone through this period of Liberal division, wrote a letter of rebuttal arguing that ‘a nationality may be made up of any number of races’, and that ‘race is only one of several elements which go to create a nationality’. Bryce accused Lubbock of ‘confusing race with nationalities’ and emphasised the power of history to fuse ‘various races’ and languages ‘into a cohesive whole’, naming Scotland, Switzerland, France and Germany as examples. The principle underlying Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill was therefore perfectly reasonable: that in questions of national sentiment ‘the opinion of each of the nationalities surviving in our islands is worth regarding’.8
Lubbock and Bryce were divided on the policy of Home Rule, and they disagreed over the details of Scotland’s historical development as the sparring continued in subsequent exchanges, but they concurred that the United Kingdom’s constituent nations were of mixed ethnology. Thomas Henry Huxley read the letters in The Times and, in a private letter, reminded Lubbock that he made a similar argument in his lecture ‘Forefathers and Forerunners of the English People’ (1870). Back then, Huxley’s remark that Cornwall and Devon were as Celtic as Tipperary was, he said, ‘hotly repudiated on both the English and the Irish sides’, but the exchange of letters between Lubbock and Bryce was welcome evidence of the slow progress of scientific opinion and the ‘exploded fallacies of Celt and Teuton’ that ‘did endless mischief a score of years ago’.9
Despite its apparent progress towards general acceptance, the concept of racial layering was far better suited to the unionist side of the debate. Beyond Lubbock’s initial statement that racial and national divisions were not in alignment, the more powerful argument came later in the letter, when Lubbock quoted John Beddoe:
With respect to the distribution and commixture of race elements in the British Isles, we may safely assert that not one of them, whether Iberian, Gaelic, Cymric, Saxon, or Scandinavian, is peculiar to, or absent from, or everywhere predominant in any one of the three kingdoms.10
This was the ultimate unionist rejoinder to any argument in favour of Home Rule, or Pan-Celtic affinity in opposition to England, that mobilised the language of race. Lubbock put Beddoe’s argument in his own words in the letter published on 25 March 1887 when he clarified that ‘Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians people in no very different proportions, and with no fixed or clear boundaries, England and Scotland and Ireland alike’, and the following week the Liberal polymath George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, wrote in support of Lubbock and against ‘the barbarous work of Parnellite Liberals’ when he declared that ‘not only are we all equally mongrels, but we are the result of the intermixture of precisely the same breeds all over the United Kingdom’.11
The Home Rule debates were not confined to Ireland, of course. The Scottish Liberal Association voted for Home Rule in 1888, and the issue gained momentum with the establishment of the Scottish Home Rule Association (1886) and the Young Scots (1900). In 1913, a Scottish Home Rule Bill passed to a second reading and drew public support from Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George.12 In a speech in 1888, Thomas Edward Ellis, Liberal MP for Merioneth between 1886 and 1899, felt that Gladstone’s recognition of ‘nationality and autonomy’ was widening the appeal of Liberalism ‘not in Ireland alone, but in Wales and Scotland likewise’. Ellis acknowledged that nations were created by racial blending, and emphasised the contributions of ‘Celtic elements’ to the ‘greatness’ of Britain but nevertheless called for the creation of ‘a national Welsh party’ and suggested that without a national assembly Wales’s ‘position as a nation can not be assured’.13 An important milestone in the growth of Welsh nationalism was the establishment in 1886 of Cymru Fydd, a cultural and literary movement that, from 1890, turned its attention towards Welsh self-government. In 1895, the Cymru Fydd League (established in 1894) and the North Wales Liberal Federation joined forces, and a young David Lloyd George made the case for ‘National Self-Government for Wales’ (1895) in the pages of the movement’s new magazine, Young Wales. However, aspirations for a unified nationalist political agenda were checked when the South Wales Liberals refused to join the alliance.14 The movement dissolved and with it any significant momentum for Welsh Home Rule, which remained a minority issue even after the establishment of Plaid Cymru in 1925.15
When, in the 1880s, the idea of Welsh Home Rule seemed to be gaining ground, the Liberal unionist William Boyd Dawkins marshalled the theory of racial layering in his defence of the political union. In a series of articles in The Manchester Examiner collected and published as The Place of the Welsh in the History of Britain (1889), Dawkins responded to the attempt ‘to raise an antagonism between the races inhabiting the British Islands’. Dawkins rejected the notion that ‘there is some essential difference between them which renders it necessary for them to live further apart from each other than they have done for centuries’.16 The Welsh were, wrote Dawkins, ‘a mixed people’ who, though they may be racially ‘defined by the Iberian element in the mixture’, are ‘composed of the same ethnological elements’ as the English, the only difference being ‘the varying proportions in which these elements are mingled in different places’.17 Dawkins cited the marked ‘Welsh element’ in the contemporary population of Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Dorset, Devon, ‘and elsewhere’, and concluded that ‘the Welsh have contributed an important element to the ethnology of England’.18 In short, the attempt to ‘stop or hinder’ the political ‘fusion of the English and Welsh’ which has been ‘to the mutual advantage of both’ was ‘futile’ and ‘mischievous’, and the promotion of ‘anti-English feeling in Wales’ was ‘unpatriotic’, ‘idle’, and pursued ‘for the sake of bolstering up the Gladstonian scheme of Home Rule in Ireland’.19
As Chris Manias has argued, the ubiquitous Iberian race was so important because it was understood to have made an enduring racial and civilisational contribution to the modern United Kingdom. This was ammunition for the likes of Dawkins because it undermined Celtic nationalism by demonstrating the ‘much deeper basis of the common country’.20 By articulating the distinctiveness of the west as a more concentrated expression of ubiquitous racial layers, it was possible for the western regions – so treasured by separatist nationalists – to become part of a diverse and pluralistic British nation. As John Munro put it in The Story of the British Race (1899), ‘the four divisions of the United Kingdom are much more akin to each other than to any foreign nation whatsoever’.21 In a mischievous passage of his own, Dawkins politicised the long history of waves of migration and suggested that if any racial group ‘deserve special consideration’ it was the Iberians, the ‘original possessors of the soil’ who were repeatedly invaded ‘by Celt, Englishman, Dane, Norman, and Fleming’. Dawkins went on:
If the Celt cry ‘hands off’ to the English, with still greater reason should the small dark inhabitants of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland cry ‘hands off’ to the Celt. This is the logical reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that different races require different political treatment simply because they are different races.22
Bringing his final article to a thunderous conclusion, Dawkins snapped that the Welsh ‘do not want home rule’, and ‘if they ask for it, they will have to bring forward a better reason than that of race’.23
British national character
The case against devolutionary and separatist nationalism took a more positive form, too. Working alongside rhetoric that sought to undermine and defuse, the argument was elsewhere reformulated in constructive terms, emphasising the contributions made by the so-called Celtic element within the British nation and British national character. As Munro put it, ‘The misnamed “Celts” are not the mere “fringe” of a Teutonic nation: they form, perhaps, the most important part of the British nation’.24 As Munro’s claim suggests, the positive case for a union of diversity recycled mid-Victorian ideas about the contrasting and complementary virtues of Celts and Saxons. If, in his letter to Lubbock in 1887, Huxley thought that popular discourse was progressing towards a more nuanced understanding of mixing as well as more careful and qualified statements about how, if at all, race shaped national character, it was also true, as Peter Mandler has put it, that this did nothing to stop those ‘who wanted to believe in a racial basis for national character from continuing to believe in it’.25
Around the turn of the twentieth century, books and articles outlining the Celtic contributions to British national character recited many of the qualities described by Ernest Renan (1854) and Matthew Arnold (1867). Renan’s Celt was ‘feeble in action’ with no ‘aptitude for political life’, which was redeemed by an ‘infinite delicacy of feeling’ and ‘[i]maginative power’ expressed in songs of ‘delicious sadness’.26 Arnold, influenced by Renan, also pointed to the ‘delicacy’ of the Celt, who was ‘sentimental’ and ‘keenly sensitive to joy and sorrow’, ‘wistful regret’, and ‘penetrating melancholy’.27 The notion of the artistic and imaginative Celt was reinforced by archaeologists who, from the 1860s and 1870s, developed a chronology for Iron Age material and attributed the fine La Tène metalwork to the Celts.28
Arnold was particularly interested in the countervailing qualities of the Celtic and Germanic geniuses. On the other side, the Germanic genius was ‘plain’, well suited to industry and science, and otherwise defined by ‘steadiness’, ‘honesty’, and a ‘lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature’.29 A revival of these stereotypes was boosted by the translation and publication of Renan’s essay in 1896 and the publication of Matthew Arnold’s treatise in numerous editions, alongside new works such as A. H. Keane’s Man Past and Present (1899), which contrasted the ‘mercurial’, ‘passionate’, and ‘impulsive’ Celt with the ‘stolid and solid’ Saxon.30
The concept of racial layering and intermixture was no barrier to the identification of distinct Celtic and Teutonic geniuses. In his book Anglo-Saxon Britain (1884), Grant Allen concluded that, in blood, the ‘British people’ consisted of ‘a pretty equal admixture of Teutonic and Celtic elements’, but this did not stop him from being able to differentiate between the ‘unimaginative’ Teuton characterised by ‘sobriety, steadiness and persistence’, ‘scientific patience’, and ‘political moderation’, and the ‘wealth of fancy’, ‘intellectual quickness’, and ‘emotional nature of the Celt’.31 On the contrary, isolating each set of characteristics added weight to the conclusion that the special qualities of the British genius sprang from the interaction of the two. This was a case of combining the best of both, which distinguished the British from both the ‘volatile and unstable Gaul’ in France and the ‘less imaginative Teutons of Germany and Scandinavia’.32 The poet and journalist T. W. Rolleston – a member of the Irish Literary Society and the Gaelic League – made the same point in Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1911), explaining that the ‘blend of Germanic and Celtic elements’ produced the uniqueness of the British, or ‘Anglo-Celtic’, people.33
One of the supposed products of the composite British character was a distinctive literary brilliance. In the introduction to the anthology of Celtic literature Lyra Celtica (1896), William Sharp claimed that mixed Celtic and Saxon roots produced literary genius in Milton, Keats, Burns, Byron and Scott. But this kind of deduction could run in the opposite direction, too. Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, had no ‘near paternal or maternal ancestor’ of Celtic blood, but Sharp nevertheless claimed that the genius of his work was itself evidence of ‘the Celtic strain in him’.34 As Joep Leerssen has pointed out, this is indicative of how the terms ‘Celtic’ and ‘Saxon’ were more commonly used as handy labels for ‘recognisable and even stereotyped national characterology’ rather than as part of a taxonomy of ‘inherited genotype and phenotype’.35 For Havelock Ellis, every great poet from Chaucer to Shakespeare and beyond combined the ‘Celtic spirit’ with what he called the ‘Nordic spirit’. Originally published in 1904, Ellis’s study of the British genius was expanded with a chapter on ‘The Celtic Spirit in Literature’ in a revised edition (1927), in which the ‘psychic qualities’ of Celtic ‘inventiveness’ and Nordic realism had produced the ‘supremacy of England in poetry’.36
Not everyone was willing to accept the Celtic contribution, though. In Celticism: A Myth (first published in 1884), the lawyer and antiquarian James Cruikshank Roger disagreed with the notion that there ever existed an identifiable ‘Celtic civilisation and Celtic art’.37 Roger identified not with what he called ‘the shiftless savage of the British Isles’ but with ‘that great Teutonic stock, which has ruled the world in the past, and will rule it to the end of time’.38 As such, he expressed what the sociologist John Mackinnon Robertson called ‘Celtophobia’ in his book The Saxon and the Celt: A Study in Sociology (1897).39 A more nuanced critique was raised by the historian William Lecky, who claimed that the differences between Celts and Teutons ‘have been enormously exaggerated’. Lecky was also tentative about the idea of national character, arguing that the nature of any such differences was a matter ‘far from settled’, and pointed out that ‘the qualities that are supposed to belong to each have very seldom the consistency that might be expected’.40 Robertson also repudiated the idea of ‘genius’ whether Celtic or Saxon and disagreed with the ‘habit of imputing specific and permanent characters to nations in the lump’.41 Edward Thomas resented the romanticised use of the term ‘Celt’ by English ‘decadents’ who would drink crème de menthe and opal hush over stout or the Welsh mead metheglin, and preferred ‘Kensington to Eryri and Connemara’.42 The subject of national character, though, was difficult to dismiss, and these dissenting voices remained caveats to the general weight of what Robertson called ‘much cultured opinion’, which indulged freely in the language of Celtic, Teutonic and British character.43
For travellers in the west, discussions of the Celtic contribution to the British national character often focused on linguistics. The languages and accents heard in the west were consistently described as musical and deeply expressive in a way that reinforced popular understandings of the imaginative, melancholy and sensitive Celt. It was not by chance that, on crossing the Tamar and entering Cornwall, one of the first things Morton noted was a woman singing ‘prettily’, with ‘a fine Celtic fluency’ also characteristic, he noted, of the Welsh.44 Linguistic differences had become easier to accommodate within the notion of a British character or genius since the publication of Johann Caspar Zeuss’s Grammatica Celtica (1853), which confirmed beyond doubt the theory that Celtic languages, alongside the Germanic, were fellow branches of the Indo-European family of languages.45
Furthermore, western landscapes became increasingly associated with the non-English languages of these isles, which were described meta- phorically as having retreated into western Ireland, western Wales and the Scottish Highlands in the face of anglicisation. Infrastructure and tourism were widely recognised as principal causes. In Skye, MacCulloch’s sense of ‘some primitive foreign land’ was strengthened by the ‘flow of Gaelic’ among the local inhabitants, but he admitted that the language was ‘far more common before the advent of MacBrayne’s steamers’.46 Irish guidebooks invariably commented on the decline of the vernacular language, and official figures showed that the proportion of Irish speakers in Connacht fell from 50.8 per cent in 1851 to 39 per cent in 1871. This was, however, still well above the national averages of 23.2 per cent and 15.1 per cent, respectively, so that the Irish language became more closely associated with the west even within a national context of decline.47 Even the Cornish language, which had not been widely used since the eighteenth century, was associated with Land’s End where, wrote Arthur Salmon, it had ‘lingered’ longest.48
The absolute number of Welsh speakers continued to rise in Wales before the First World War, even as the proportion fell below fifty per cent by 1911. Welsh was spoken at the chapel and the eisteddfod, and read in weekly newspapers, quarterly journals and a vibrant literary culture.49 Nevertheless, the same metaphor described a language retreating westwards, away from the industrial valleys that attracted English and Irish labourers and into ‘hilly districts’,50 or along the Llŷn Peninsula, beyond the reach of the ‘tourist-tide’.51 Drawing on 1931 census data, D. Trevor Williams mapped the continuing trend showing that the Welsh language was spoken at a greater rate in upland areas, and one of the ‘most complete’ areas of anglicisation was along the north coastal plain between Llandudno and Prestatyn – a result of railway construction in the 1850s and the continuing popularity of the area among tourists.52 As the author Rhys Davies put it, the ‘unusual loveliness of North Wales’ which attracted so many tourists ‘has been a curse’ from the perspective of ‘a nationalist preservation of the Cymric spirit’.53
When faced with the linguistic diversity of the British-Irish Isles, both in language and in accent, commentators displayed a range of views including celebration and genuine interest, disdain, derisive humour, and a mixed response neatly captured by the terms ‘sentimental condescension’ and ‘repressive tolerance’.54 They seemed to agree, though, that the Celt’s affinity for creativity and sentimentality could be heard in the voices of the local population. The archaeologist R. A. S. MacAlister, for instance, explained how the Irish spoken in Connacht was ‘more expressive and more musical’ than elsewhere,55 and in Cornwall Ellis claimed that the language of the people ‘scarcely sounds English to the stranger’. The marker of difference in Cornwall was not the language itself, of course, but rather the ‘inflection of the Cornish voice’, which ‘rises in a musical wave to a climax reached about the antepenultimate syllable’ – a ‘soft inflection’, Ellis continued, that ‘breaks as gratefully as the ripple of the Cornish summer sea on the rocks’ in contrast to the ‘harshness of English voices’.56
There were exceptions, of course, such as the ‘grim austerities’ of an outdoor Presbyterian service in Skye, where, MacCulloch wrote, the Gaelic singing and the preacher’s voice had ‘a certain romantic quaintness’, but the overriding impression was of ‘the most narrow of Puritanic sects and the barbaric chant of some forgotten but indigenous paganism’.57 More in keeping with the stereotype of the musical Celt was the suggestion made by Harry Batsford and Charles Fry, that the Gaelic ‘still widely spoken about the Highlands’ was ‘vigorous in address, rich in assertion, and, perhaps as the result of the ingrained enthusiasm of the Celt for story-telling and poetry, graceful, picturesque and witty in its phrasing’.58
Perhaps most indulgent was Morton, who heard a girls’ choir singing in a Caernarfonshire school in preparation for the upcoming eisteddfod in Bangor. The choir sang mournfully, in Welsh, about a slate quarryman injured during an accident, followed by a ‘savage’ rendition of Cymru’n Un (Wales United). The song, wrote Morton, sounded like ‘centuries of pride interpreted in sound’, the voice of ‘old Wales defying Saxon, Norman and English’, and it made the English visitor ‘feel like the enemy’. Finally, voices of defiance became complementary when the schoolgirls sang in English and brought a romantic feel to some Elizabethan madrigals by singing them ‘beautifully, but a trifle sadly’. Welsh singing had, therefore, evoked both the ‘old romantic and darkly passionate voice of Britain’ and ‘Merrie England in a faint mist’.59
There was plenty of disdain and dismissiveness in travel books, too. A note of condescension entered Ward and Lock’s North Wales (1883), which promised to ‘not inflict the Welsh on our readers’ when describing the songs of Maelgwyn’s bards.60 Similarly, another guidebook noted the ‘amusement which visitors may derive’ from the ‘phonetic perplexities’ of Welsh place-names.61 Writing in 1935, Edmund Vale lamented the ‘unfair treatment’ given to the Welsh language in hackneyed jibes that claimed an Englishman’s attempt to pronounce Welsh words would ‘incur the grave physical risk of a broken jaw’.62
A sterner line of criticism focused on the perceived impracticality of languages such as Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish. In an introductory section on the Irish language, Black’s Ireland (1900) quoted the view of classicist John Pentland Mahaffy, who denounced the Irish language movement as a ‘fuss’ that was both ‘amusing’ and ‘melancholy’. Mahaffy argued it impractical to insist ‘upon our youth re-learning their nearly extinct language’, and that ‘the use of a distinct national language would not necessarily sustain a direct national spirit’.63 The lack of practical utility was also the reason that the Penguin guide to Cornwall (1939) dismissed the revival of Cornish, ‘which is quite adequate for announcing that the pig is in the river, but useless for buying a packet of cigarettes’.64
There were, then, strict limits on the extent to which the linguistic differences of the west were tolerated. The Thorough Guide: Highlands and Islands (1884) made this clear when, after the Ordnance Survey map adopted vernacular spellings of place-names, the guidebook despaired at the ‘strict’ and ‘remorseless’ ‘Gaelicism’, which produced a map that represented an ‘abiding illustration of the Gaelic tongue’ but was ‘most bewildering’ to those who wished to use the map for ‘ordinary purposes, especially those of the tourist’. The publication did not wish to quarrel with the Gael ‘for maintaining the integrity of his own language’ but maintained that ‘Saxon’ spelling should have been included, given that ‘these maps are paid for by the nation at large and not by any particular section of it’.65
In many publications it was made explicit that cultural and linguistic differences could be tolerated and even celebrated as long as this did not stray into political nationalism. For instance, Murray’s Ireland (1906) celebrated the ‘Gaelic movement’ for having ‘revived the study of the Irish language and literature’ along with music, dramatic art and ‘old Irish sports and pastimes’, but insisted that the movement would only succeed in ‘brightening the homes and enriching the lives of the peasantry’ if it ‘keeps itself free from the intrusion of that plague of things Irish, politics’.66 Similarly, in his introductory essay in the Blue Guide: Wales (1922), H. J. Fleure claimed that the success of Welsh nationalism in winning ‘the special respect and sympathy of the other inhabitants of Britain’ was due to its pursuit of ‘spiritual rather than political ends’.67
For all the jokes, intolerance and sentimental condescension, the complementary model of Celt and the Saxon also carved out a space for the celebration of linguistic and cultural differences, and this space was occupied by unionists and nationalists alike. Historians tend to emphasise the condescending tone of Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), and draw attention to Arnold’s call for the death of the Welsh language.68 However, Welsh nationalists such as T. E. Ellis felt no shame in quoting Arnold when describing the ‘Celtic elements’ that provided Britain with its ‘special power and genius’.69 In a speech on ‘The Influence of the Celt in the Making of Britain’ (1889), Ellis singled out Arnold for his appreciation of ‘the Celtic genius’, which had helped to arm the Welsh against ‘spasmodic and aggressive outbursts of literary Jingoism’, otherwise known as ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ or ‘ “Rule Britannia” fever’.70 Yeats did not dismiss Arnold and Renan outright, either, instead hoping to take what was ‘helpful’ and discard the ‘hurtful’.71 In discussions of the national character, racial mixtures and linguistic differences could reinforce a sense of national distinctiveness while also strengthening Britishness.72 As the historian and cultural nationalist O. M. Edwards put it in A Short History of Wales (1906), some races ‘have more imagination’ while others have ‘more energy and practical wisdom’, and the ‘best nations have both’ because ‘many races have been blended in their making’.73
Centuries of conflict and union
Narratives of Britishness which began with vast epochs of geological time and moved through millennia of racial and linguistic developments culminated in centuries of historical conflict that were apparently resolved through a series of mutually beneficial political unions. Travel books shaped the national consciousness of a public that consumed history in many forms. As Paul Readman has shown, the popularity of history books grew in Britain in the decades before 1914, while local newspapers reported the activities of archaeological and historical societies in detail. Antiquarianism remained popular in this period, and well-attended historical pageants brought scenes from history to life for participants and observers alike, while the growing preservation movement sought to protect historic buildings and landscapes such as the commons. Travel literature, which proliferated in this period, was also historically minded, and educated holidaymakers and armchair tourists about the past.74 Travel books were important sources of information which, as Rudy Koshar has observed, shaped the public’s understanding of the nation as a community with historical continuity. In guidebooks, tourism and the nation ‘met on hallowed cultural ground’.75
Historically minded travel literature conveyed a distinctive sense of place and at the same time connected local events and individuals to a broader historical narrative. Potentially problematic episodes of this history – such as recurrent Welsh rebellions, the Civil Wars and the Jacobite risings – were often closely associated with western and borderland locations. The narratives that emerged put a unionist spin on these events, which became key moments in the story of the inevitable transition from brave and heroic resistance to mutually beneficial union. In this way, as Readman argues, ‘blood-soaked’ landscapes that were ‘powerfully evocative’ of historical conflict were also important for the construction of what Graeme Morton calls ‘unionist-nationalism’, in which the proud articulation of national defiance can coexist with the claim that the United Kingdom is a ‘union of equals’. The landscapes of the west accommodated regional, national and transnational narratives of nationhood, displaying the ‘plural and complexly imbricated’ nature of British identities.76
Narratives of union
Descriptions of Cornwall’s history were detailed and wide-ranging in travel literature, but most writers included a handful of historical episodes that connected Cornwall with English and British history. Fowey, for instance, was famous for the 47 ships and 770 men who left its harbour to join Edward III’s fleet for the siege of Calais (1346–47),77 and when passing through Plymouth and the Cornish Mount Edgcumbe it was common for writers to look towards the Channel and contemplate England’s victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588.78 Near Falmouth, St Mawes Castle offered tourists another example of English coastal fortifications. The castle was built by Henry VIII who, travel writers and guidebooks often mentioned, honeymooned with Anne Boleyn in nearby St Just in Roseland.79 Cornish locations were also connected to the Civil Wars, whether they were the sites of victory such as Braddock Down and Stratton that elicited Charles I’s letter of thanks to Cornish Royalists,80 or Tresilian Bridge, which marked the spot where the Royalist Cornish forces surrendered to Fairfax in 1646.81 Cornwall’s contributions to Britain were evident in the more recent period of the Napoleonic Wars. In that ‘stirring epoch’, recounted the Great Western Railway’s Cornish Riviera (1905), Sir Edward Pellew (whose family was from western Cornwall) and John Borlase Warren sailed against the French, and the prizes taken ‘were constantly brought into Falmouth port for adjudication and sale’.82 For historians such as A. L. Rowse, it was ‘not surprising that we should presume to interpret England’s story in a West Country setting’.83
The bulk of Cornwall’s contributions to Britain came from the granite quarries of Cheesewring and Penryn, which, as various guidebooks noted, provided the stone ‘so extensively used in many important structures in London’ such as Westminster and Waterloo bridges and the Duke of Wellington’s sarcophagus in St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as Chatham docks, many of the London docks and Plymouth breakwater.84 The kaolin or china clay industry, with its centre near St Austell, exported its wares across the world and secured Cornwall’s place in British manufacturing.85 In addition to historical events, granite and china clay, contributions also came in the form of Cornish ‘worthies’, who ranged from King Arthur to the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, the engineer and inventor of the high-pressure steam engine Richard Trevithick, the travel writer George Borrow, the novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch and a host of lesser known ‘characters’.86
More complicated were the landscapes of north Wales and Skye, which were more often associated with episodes of conflict with the English. Historical narratives of Wales typically began in the post-Roman period with Cunedda who, it was recited, played a formative role in uniting the Iberian, Goidel and Brython as fellow countrymen, or Cymry, in the face of invasions from Ireland from the west and Anglo-Saxons from the east. A familiar cast of historical characters followed the story of Wales through its great leaders such as Maelgwyn, King Alfred’s contemporary Rhodri Mawr, and the lawmaker Hywel Dda. However, more space was generally reserved for the late medieval and early modern story of Norman conquest, rebellion and the sixteenth-century political union. Ward Lock’s North Wales (1883), for instance, dedicated nearly a quarter of its seventeen-page historical introduction to ‘Edward’s Conquest of Wales’, and this section of the guidebook was bookended by images of Edward I and Edward II, ‘The First English Prince of Wales’.87 Key episodes of rebellion included the risings of Llywelyn ap Iowerth in 1211, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282, and Owain Glyndŵr between 1400 and 1415,88 and this history was so closely associated with conquest and resistance that the language of invading or plundering became a metaphor for travelling into Wales.89
Guidebooks and travel writers revelled in descriptions of the fighting that preceded political union, and the castles of the region were monuments to this bloody struggle. Dolbadarn Castle, built by Llywelyn ap Iowerth on the shores of Llyn Padarn to protect the Llanberis Pass through the mountains, was later used by Owain Glyndŵr to imprison Lord and Lady Grey of Ruthin, so told Burrow’s Guide to North Wales (c.1923).90 George Eyre-Todd described the history of Maelgwyn’s medieval Deganwy Castle, built on the River Conwy, which was captured by Henry III from Llywelyn ap Iowerth and rebuilt in stone only for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to besiege it with Henry inside. The king escaped, but the castle did not, and it was destroyed by the Prince of Wales.91 Overshadowing the Welsh castles were the Norman fortresses at Flint, Rhuddlan, Conwy, Caernarfon, Beaumaris and Harlech, built by Edward I during and after his conquest of Wales (1277–83). These imposing structures, with their thick walls, towers, portcullises and doorways, were symbols of invasion and annexation, but they also became grand stages for the story of the union. Caernarfon Castle was particularly important because Edward I summoned the Welsh chiefs there and, according to Eyre-Todd:
when they called out that they would acknowledge no prince but one born in Wales, who would speak to them in the Welsh tongue, he produced to them his infant son, born a few days previously in Carnarvon itself. ‘Here’, he cried, ‘is your prince, born in Wales, and I undertake that he shall speak to you in the Welsh tongue’.92
In this retelling, the story of subjugation was replaced by one of negotiated authority. As Ward Lock’s North Wales (1883) put it, the Welsh ‘were not subdued’ and retained their loyalty to a prince who was, technically, Welsh.93 This is a plainly unionist and controversial reading of history, which was, and remains, fiercely contested by many people in Wales. However, in the early twentieth century Caernarfon Castle became an important location for the celebration of Welshness within a multinational interpretation of Britishness. As John Ellis has shown, the revival of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales ceremony in 1911 was a vibrant articulation of ‘a sense of Britishness reconciling ethnic diversity within a multinational state’.94 Amid the ruins of Caernarfon Castle, seventeen-year-old Prince Edward (the future King Edward VIII) was formally recognised as the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. In the castle courtyard, daffodils, dragons, and leeks adorned the crumbling medieval walls; an image of St David – the patron saint of Wales – was placed above the royal canopy; and the ceremony concluded with a rousing rendition of the Welsh national anthem. The event was widely publicised on film, in photographs, and in newspaper columns throughout the country and the Empire, and its message was aimed as much at the Irish as at the Welsh. At a time when John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power in Westminster and Home Rule was back on the Liberal agenda, the Investiture demonstrated how a distinctive culture and strong sense of nationality could be reconciled with the British state.95 The monarchy also became associated with Welsh cultural revival, and in 1894 the future Edward VII and his wife Alexandra were made members of the Gorsedd.96
The pageantry of the Investiture was not exceptional, and two years earlier the Cardiff National Pageant reenacted Welsh history through a series of heroes before concluding with the story of the union and, like the Conway Pageant in 1927, with renditions of the Welsh national anthem followed by ‘God Save the King’.97 Pageantry grew in popularity in interwar Wales, and a few years after the First World War the pageant at Harlech Castle (1922) used the site of past oppression for a performance that emphasised the futility of war, while at the Aberystwyth pageant (1935) audiences were encouraged to draw parallels between 1283 and 1918, when periods of bloodshed were followed by peace.98 At these events, centuries of conflict were reinterpreted as a prelude to peace and union that could be satisfactory to a population that combined their distinctive Welsh national identity with membership of the United Kingdom.
Furthermore, the castles were symbols of and tributes to what Morton called ‘the fighting qualities of the Welsh’.99 Apart from reminding readers of the long and violent wars between English kings and Welsh princes, it supported a constructive interpretation of historical conflict whereby the loyalty and bravery of the Welsh was appropriated by the British nation. As Morton explained, the Welsh fought battles against ‘the might of England’, but this was subsequently manifested in military contributions to shared efforts.100 He explained that the ‘ancient Britons who inhabit these mountains’ fought against ‘Roman, Saxon, Norman, English’, and ‘when they were not fighting against the English they were fighting with them’.101 In spite of the narratives of conquest and resistance described above, Morton declared that ‘the Welsh are our oldest allies’, and pointed out that ‘five thousand Welsh archers and spearmen fought with us at Crecy’ (1346), while they also ‘drew their bows at Agincourt’ (1415). In these and many other battles, the Welsh longbow ‘became the national weapon of England’.102
The second major historical episode of unification centred on the accession of Henry Richmond to the English throne as Henry VII when, as George Borrow put it, ‘a prince of Cumric blood won the crown of fair Britain’.103 According to Jenkinson’s North Wales (1878), the fact that Henry was the grandson of Owain Tudor, a ‘Welsh gentleman of princely descent’, gave ‘exceeding satisfaction to the Welsh’.104 O. M. Edwards made the same claim in A Short History of Wales (1906), and suggested that during the Wars of the Roses ‘the people of Wales welcomed Henry as a Welshman who would rule them kindly and justly’.105 The Tudor monarchy was also important because it was in the 1530s and 1540s that the union was formalised, and, as Black’s North Wales (1883) put it, the ‘brave people’ were made ‘fellow-citizens with their conquerors’.106 As a result, the union became a settled historical matter, and Baedeker’s Great Britain (1910) declared confidently that Wales ‘has been an integral and undisputed part of the British monarchy since 1535’.107 In Ward Lock’s North Wales (1883), the union saw Wales formally incorporated into the United Kingdom and, as a result, the Welsh were granted ‘all English privileges’.108 Edwards echoed these sentiments when he explained that during the Tudor period the Welsh people ‘became united, law-abiding, patriotic, and prosperous’. ‘[I]t was called an Act of Union’, Edwards concluded, because ‘Wales and England were united on equal terms’.109 This reading of the union was compatible with a more assertive Welsh identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which also found an institutional expression of national pride in the University Colleges of Wales at Aberystwyth, Bangor and Cardiff (which received royal assent in 1893), the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth (approved by the government in 1905) and the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (established by Royal Charter in 1907).110
Much like north Wales, Skye was also the setting for a series of glamourised conflicts followed by integration and contribution to the British nation and Empire. Every location had its historical associations, including the village of Kyleakin, the point of entry for many travellers to Skye and supposedly named after the Norwegian King Haakon IV, who passed through the strait with his armada in 1263.111 The steamer also stopped at Portree – ‘the king’s port’ – which, it was said, derived its name from James V’s visit in 1540.112 Six miles north-west of Portree the travel books recommended St Columba’s Isle, which marked the spot where the saint stood on an isolated boulder ‘and preached the gospel to the heathen Celts’.113 But beyond the spread of Christianity and periods of Nordic rule, the historical narratives of Skye were dominated by two themes: the bloody feuds between the clans of MacLeod and Macdonald, and the flight of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion (1745–6).
The battles between Clan MacLeod and Clan Macdonald of Sleat took place all over the island, and the travel literature indulged in gory descriptions of blood and slaughter. In Black’s Guide to Scotland: North (1920), Mitton recounted the story associated with the ruined church at Trumpan, on the Vaternish peninsula, which was a monument to an atrocity. The Macdonalds, who landed from Uist, found a group of their MacLeod enemies at worship, and set the church alight with the congregation inside. Only one woman escaped to tell the tale.114 MacCulloch, in Misty Isle of Skye (1905), explained that the attack of the Macdonalds was made in revenge for a massacre at Eigg, and, after watching their fire burn ‘with savage glee’ they were in turn slain after the MacLeods saw the smoke from Dunvegan. The cycle continued, and the Macdonalds returned for a cattle raid that ended in another battle near Trumpan where Roderick, son of Ian MacLeod of Unish, had his legs cut at the knees but ‘continued to stand on his stumps cutting down all comers’ before eventually falling himself.115
Travel writers and guidebooks spared no detail in their descriptions of these battles. The Bloody Stone, in Harta Corrie, marked the spot where the MacLeods and Macdonalds fought in 1398 ‘until’, one guidebook wrote, ‘blood ran like water’.116 Likewise, at another battle near the head of Loch Caroy, MacCulloch claimed that the bloodshed was so great that ‘the heather was dyed a deeper purple with the blood of the clansmen’.117 Some of the romanticised stories of violent adventure took on an almost mythical quality, evident in MacCulloch’s description of the Loch Caroy battle which, he wrote, was fought ‘in the mist, like that other last weird battle in the West’ described by Tennyson in ‘The Passing of Arthur’.118 The landscapes of Skye became the archetypal setting for imagining the stereotypical Highland clansman and his bloody feuds. MacCulloch wondered at the ‘peaceful beauty’ of the Vaternish peninsula and its ‘savage traditions’ of men who ‘lived only for the lust of fighting and slaughter’, while the ‘wild’ landscape at Coire-na-Creiche, in the Cuillin, was matched by the ‘shouts of war’ and ‘passions of men’ that rang out in 1601, when the clans fought their last battle.119
Skye was also folded into the story of the Jacobite rebellion, when Charles Edward Stuart fled to the island after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. This episode of conflict was much more recent than the medieval struggles between England and Wales, but the ’45 was soon glamourised and romanticised once the political threat of the Highland warriors had been extinguished.120 The Stuart Prince was a sympathetic character in the guidebooks, which described his ‘sorry plight’ after ‘the fateful day of Culloden’.121 MacCulloch made it clear that ‘our sympathies are equally divided between the victims of the butcher Cumberland’s cruelty and the Prince as he wandered, hunted and homeless, with a price on his head that tempted nobody’.122
After Culloden, the Prince’s wanderings took him to South Uist where, pursued by soldiers, he was disguised as an Irish servant and smuggled to Skye with the aid of Flora Macdonald. The tourist’s journey to Skye typically passed the island of Raasay, and the guidebooks rarely failed to point out that this was the place where ‘Prince Charlie was sheltered for one night’ in 1746.123 Skye, too, was famous for ‘intimate associations’ with the ‘weary odyssey’ of Bonnie Prince Charlie,124 and tourists could visit ‘Prince Charlie’s Cave’, where, so it was said, he found refuge for a night – although the claim was doubtful.125 Among the treasures at Dunvegan castle were letters written by Prince Charlie to the chief of Clan MacLeod,126 and at Kingsburgh House tourists could look upon the ruins of another place where ‘the Royal fugitive slept for a night’, and where Dr Johnson ‘sat listening with eager attention to Flora Macdonald’ herself.127
The association between Skye and the Jacobite cause was not a straightforward one, though, because after supporting the rising of 1715 the chiefs of clans MacLeod and Macdonald raised forces for George II in 1745. Nevertheless, Skye was redeemed in MacCulloch’s narrative by virtue of the clansmen, many of whom, upon learning that they were mustered to fight against the Stuart Prince, ‘went off on their own account to join him’.128 Moncrieff also suggested that, while ‘not many’ Macdonalds, MacLeods, or MacKinnons ‘turned out to take risks in his [Prince Charlie’s] rash enterprise’ they had in part redeemed themselves by ‘not very keenly play[ing] the bloodhound upon the fugitive’s doublings’ and thus assisting his escape.129
The ‘Soldier Sons’ of Skye had, as MacKinnon pointed out, also demonstrated their fierce loyalty and fighting qualities in support of Robert the Bruce in 1314 and Charles II in 1651.130 And, as in the case of Wales, this history was told as a tale of brave but doomed military resistance that was transformed into a valuable contribution to the British armed forces. This implication was made explicit by Quigley, who added Montrose’s campaigns during the Civil Wars to the story of Britain, in which two nations ‘coalesced into one State’.131 This popular history was in the mould of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels depicted historical conflict as part of a teleological narrative of British integration.132 During the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, MacKinnon counted ‘21 Lieutenant-Generals and Major-Generals, 45 Lieutenant-Colonels, 600 Majors, Captains, and other commissioned officers, 120 pipers, 10,000 foot soldiers, and one Adjutant-General’ among Skye’s British Army recruits.133
The fighting qualities of the Highland clans – unacceptable when perceived as a domestic threat – also became prized attributes in the imperial context.134 In A Summer in Skye (1885), Alexander Smith described how the people of the Highlands ‘have wielded the sword industriously’, contributing ‘in every Peninsular and Indian battle-field’. In particular, Skye ‘has itself given to the British and Indian armies at least a dozen generals’, while others have set forth ‘to plant indigo in Bengal or coffee in Ceylon’.135 Highland soldiers were often singled out for praise for their contributions in Crimea, during the Indian Rebellion (1857–8), during the Ashantee War (1873), in Dargai on the North West Frontier (1895), and in the second Anglo–South African War (1899–1902).136 In the interwar period, the Great War became part of the same narrative, and Donald MacKinnon counted 2,000 Skyemen who fought in ‘France and Flanders, in Egypt, the Dardenelles, and in Mesopotamia’.137 According to one guidebook, the National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle ‘is not only a monument to the brave dead; it is the expression of a living spirit’.138 Just as the Welsh had retained their nationality as fellow citizens, it was made clear that Scotland’s nationality also remained undiluted. The military contributions were overtly Scottish, and Highland regiments wore their tartan and were often led by family members of clan chiefs. In the British armed forces, symbols of Highland Scotland and clan identity could flourish within an overarching sense of Britishness.139
In an article on the ‘History of Scotland’, which appeared in Ward and Lock’s Complete Scotland (1933), the Scottish historian J. D. Mackie asserted that, ‘often defeated, the Scots managed to hold their own until accident of dynasty produced the Union of the Crowns in 1603’, and ‘in spite of’ two centuries of union from 1707, the nation ‘maintains her nationality intact at the present day’. Through the narrative of brave yet doomed resistance, and a unification of the crowns, Scotland became ‘a part of the United Kingdom’, and remained ‘keenly conscious of her own individuality’.140 Quoting Alexander Smith’s A Summer in Skye, MacKinnon extolled the achievements of the Highlanders, who waved the tartans ‘through the smoke of every British battle’, and ‘in her time of need Britain never called in vain to the men of Skye’.141 This was a constructive union, evident in the ‘Empire-builders’ and colonial governors who went forth ‘from the glens and straths’ of the Highlands.142 In these narratives, historical conflict need not threaten the political integrity of the British state, which was able to contain and also to celebrate Scottish as well as Welsh national difference.
Writers such as George Birkbeck Hill and Morton constructed entertaining scenes around the theme of an unthreatening and romantic Highland spirit. During his stay in Portree while tracing the Footsteps of Dr Johnson (1890), Hill spotted ‘a company of Highland volunteers’ dressed in tartan plaids and kilts, and accompanied by the bagpipes as they underwent their annual inspection. This, of course, brought to Hill’s mind the ‘days of their forefathers’ when ‘twelve Highlanders and a bagpipe made a rebellion’ and laws against Highland arms and dress would have seen these men ‘sent off by summary process to serve as a common soldier’. This troubled history was quickly dispelled by Hill, who confirmed that ‘we live in loyal days’, and the only punishment at risk of being received by these men was ‘a fine of five shillings for being drunk and disorderly’, which from Hill’s perspective became more likely as the evening progressed. ‘Let us hope’, remarked Hill dryly, ‘that their excess was little more than an excess of loyalty in drinking the health of a Hanoverian queen’.143
Morton’s anecdote emphasised the sentimental memory of Bonnie Prince Charlie during a night of singing in his Aberdeen hotel. Having purchased a first edition of Hogg’s songbook Jacobite Relics of Scotland, Morton set in motion an evening of drinking and singing the ‘old rebel songs’ with a group of men in the smoking room and Maggie from the hotel reception on the piano. After enthusiastic renditions of ‘Bonnie Charlie’ followed by ‘The Wee, Wee German Lairdie’, ‘MacLean’s Welcome’, and ‘Will He No’ Come Back Again?’ the singers were ‘wearing white cockades in our hearts’144 and ‘mourned that we were born two centuries too late’. In this songbook was ‘the heart of the Highlands’, and so inspired was Morton that he asked himself which of them would not ‘gladly have expired on the Hanoverian bayonets at Culloden?’ Far from spilling over into any real hostility, the atmosphere of ‘violent prejudice, primitive hatred, scornful contempt, sly humour, and reckless sincerity’ was soon dissipated as some members of the group became aware of their ‘sentimentalism’ and ‘romanticism’. Morton’s shift of tone was completed in characteristic fashion, by undercutting the atmosphere built over several pages, when one of the singers commented that the Prince of Wales was ‘the only prince in modern Europe whose charm recalls that of Bonnie Prince Charlie’, at which point Maggie looked forward in excitement to the prince visiting Aberdeen to open the new water works.145
Narratives of hope
Triumphant narratives of union did not easily translate to historical accounts of Ireland, where conflict could not be placed safely in the past. Instead, the discussion inevitably slipped into contemporary politics, culminating in expressions of hope that the conflict might yet be resolved.
Locations such as Galway Bay were connected to a broader historical narrative through major events such as the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588. After failing to escort soldiers from Flanders to England due to adverse weather conditions and repeated attacks by English ships, the Armada returned to Spain via the Scottish and Irish coast. Black’s Ireland (1877) recalled that one of the retreating ships was wrecked in Galway Bay, and over seventy of the crew died. Along the coast ‘several other vessels were lost’, and the survivors were massacred on the orders of Sir William FitzWilliam, Lord Deputy of Ireland.146
Similarly, another narrative strategy familiar to readers of Welsh and Scottish guidebooks was history told through the expansion of English power. But, unlike the Welsh and Scottish narratives, the emphasis was on conquest and defeat rather than on brave resistance and integration. In the section on Galway, Murray’s Handbook for Ireland (1906) began the story in 1226, when the Anglo-Norman Richard Mór de Burgh received his king’s approval to invade Connacht. De Burgh captured Galway in 1232 and rebuilt the fortifications, after which time the city ‘became a flourishing English colony’.147 The story continued when Richard II (r. 1377–99) granted a charter of incorporation for the city of Galway, which remained loyal to the king during the Irish Rebellion (1641) but suffered ‘barbarous treatment at the hands of the Parliamentary army’ before surrendering to Edmund Ludlow in 1652. Finally, after the battle of Aughrim (1691) during the Williamite Wars, Ginkell laid siege to Galway city, which surrendered after a couple of days.148 The local history of Galway in Murray’s Handbook reflects the way this guidebook and many others depicted Ireland as ‘always the “home of lost causes”’, where the ‘curse of Cromwell’ could still be sensed by the tourist.149
Unlike their Welsh and Scottish counterparts, the Irish were not celebrated for their contributions to the British armed forces and empire. There was no shortage of material for constructing such a narrative, because the population of Ireland was consistently over-represented in the British armed forces in the nineteenth century. In 1830, for instance, the Irish made up less than one-third of the total population of the United Kingdom but accounted for over forty-two per cent of soldiers in the British Army. At this time, there were more Irish soldiers than English in the army, and the Irish remained over-represented to the end of the century.150 Furthermore, Chapter 5 discussed the rising stock of the Irish soldier, who was praised by Munro for strengthening the British Empire. After their successful contributions to the second Anglo–South African War (which compared favourably with Highland units), Irish soldiers also won praise from Queen Victoria, who visited Dublin on St Patrick’s Day in 1900 and established the Irish Guards in recognition of their bravery and loyalty. In addition, Irish regiments were permitted to wear shamrock during Victoria’s visit, thereby appropriating an Irish national emblem and angering pro-Boer Irish nationalists. St Patrick’s Day in 1900 became a public celebration of Irish soldiers, who were widely praised in the popular press.151
However, lists of contributions made by the Irish to the defence of Britain and the expansion of the Empire were absent from the guidebooks. Alvin Jackson has suggested that the Irish received less public recognition because of the alternative military tradition in Ireland which, from the 1790s to the 1910s, meant that the British state ‘could not claim exclusive rights over the loyalties of Irish fighters’.152 After the Great War, for instance, Scottish soldiers were commemorated in a National War Memorial which used the ‘iconography of union and monarchy’, whereas the contributions made by Irish soldiers were discussed in the context of the debates about self-government. The ‘Irishness reinforced in the trenches’, argues Jackson, had the potential to feed into republican activism in a way that simply did not occur in Scotland and Wales.153
Furthermore, to be convincing, the story of conflict followed by union required that the period of antagonism be perceived as distant, and in the safety of the historical past. When it came to Ireland, this story simply could not be told, because in touching on the subject of the union guidebooks and travel writers inevitably slipped into the difficult realm of contemporary politics. Returning to Murray’s Handbook for Ireland (1906), the introductory historical sketch told the story of the union through a series of events including the repeal of Poynings’ Law, the rise of the United Irishmen, and the suppression of the 1798 rebellion, culminating in the Acts of Union (1800). But, in place of a triumphant description of a settled historical matter, the union remained an open question about which ‘[m]uch sentiment has been expended’. At this point, the historical narrative slipped unavoidably into politics, which put the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) alongside ‘legislation of recent years’ such as the Local Government (Ireland) Act (1898) and the Land Acts (1870–1906). As a result, the ‘transformation’ of local government from ‘the hands of the classes to the hands of the masses’, and a similarly transformative ‘transference of property’ led the guidebook to look forward to ‘the fuller development of her [Ireland’s] resources’ and a ‘full and true solution’ to ‘that vexed “Irish question”’ effected in measures ‘ever devised in the United Kingdom’.154
Such hopeful sentiments were repeated by many travel writers, who also slipped between centuries of historical conflict and contemporary politics. In The Charm of Ireland (1914), for instance, Burton E. Stevenson could not separate centuries of history from politics when, on the road between Galway, Clifden and Leenaun, his attempt to explain the current situation of the ‘congested districts’ began with the period ‘[a]fter Cromwell had subdued Ireland’.155 Stevenson trod carefully, and made it clear he did not wish to ‘judge a seventeenth-century Parliament by twentieth-century ideals’, but this was a difficult prelude to a discussion of the work carried out by the Congested Districts Board.156 Likewise, Madame de Bovet connected the present ‘suffering of the western counties’ with the ‘great transplanting effected by Cromwell in 1654’.157
In an attempt to reassure his readers, Stevenson confirmed that by 1914 the trouble of the ‘Land League days’ had been ‘solved’, so that the Irish people and visiting tourists ‘can afford to forget the past’, while, writing in 1908, William Eleroy Curtis also noted that the land agitations were ‘gentle and mild’ disturbances when compared with ‘the land wars of the past’.158 The hopeful and reassuring tone remained a feature of the genre after the Partition of Ireland and the establishment of the Free State. For Morton, the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922) marked the end of centuries of ‘racial war’, and he looked forward to the day when the troubles of the past could be treated with ‘a sense of historical perspective’. Similarly, Stephen Gwynn understood the traveller’s desire to know about ‘recent events, as well as of what has passed into settled history’.159 Nevertheless, in the interwar period the conflict over land tenure was replaced by new sites of tension, including the trade wars between Britain and Ireland and the difficulties of policing the border between Northern Ireland and the Free State.160
Conclusion
The final two chapters of this book suggest that, in addition to their importance for national identity and for projects of separatist nationalism, western landscapes were also at the heart of a multinational and pluralistic version of Britishness in the years before the Partition of Ireland. There were many layers to this ambitious vision, beginning with geological sequences that ordered the layers of the landscape and spatialised historical time. This provided a framework for understanding the racial, historical, linguistic and cultural layers of the British-Irish Isles, and the importance of the west at its foundation. As an important source of information, guidebooks and travel books drew on the varied disciplines of archaeology, anatomy, anthropology, history and philology, and shaped popular understandings of the composition of the nations in the British-Irish Isles. In the west, the ‘Iberian’ and ‘Celtic’ layers were deemed most expressive, and made important contributions to the British national character.
Above geological deep time and millennia of racial and linguistic developments rested the centuries of historical time, which described the enduring contributions made by Cornwall, the retention of Welsh nationality as fellow citizens and equals, and the Highland portion of Scottish nationality that remained undiluted after political union. In these narratives, historical associations of conflict and division did not threaten the political integrity of the British state. On the contrary, this history was one that celebrated Welsh and Scottish national differences and adopted them as a productive force in culture and in the armed forces. All of this indicated that multinational diversity could flourish within an overarching sense of Britishness, and travel writing encouraged what Colin Kidd has called ‘a liberal and dignified Union’ which ‘involved a national component’.161 This is not to suggest that travel writers remained apolitical in these places. Whether it was the decline of the Cornish mining industry,162 industrial relations at the Penrhyn quarries in Wales,163 or the workings of the Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act (1886) and the findings of the Napier Commission (1883) on Skye,164 travellers remained committed to their self-proclaimed responsibility to investigate the social and economic conditions of the west. But crucially, this did not intrude on the triumphant narrative of inclusive and mutually beneficial union in the way that it did in Ireland, where the question of beneficial union was still an open one. In this sense, historical narratives of conflict and union revealed the varieties of, but also the challenges facing, Britishness in the west.
Notes
1. Leerssen, ‘Celticism’.
2. In travel writing, contemporaries often included Ireland in what was called the ‘British’ nation.
3. Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism, 24.
4. This tendency is discussed in S. J. Connolly, ‘Varieties of Britishness: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian State’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (Routledge, 1995), 193–207.
5. Williams, The Welsh in Their History, 194.
6. Mr Gladstone and the Nationalities of the United Kingdom: A Series of Letters to the “Times” by Sir John Lubbock with Rejoinders by Mr J. Bryce, MP (London, 1887), 7–13, letter of 18 March 1887, 12–13.
7. P. B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge, 1986), 20; see Mr Gladstone and the Nationalities of the United Kingdom, 7–13, letter of 18 March 1887. For an introduction to Lubbock’s views on race, see Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination, 215–18.
8. Rich, Race and Empire, 20–21; see Mr Gladstone and the Nationalities of the United Kingdom, 13–15, letter of 21 March 1887.
9. Mr Gladstone and the Nationalities of the United Kingdom, 43–4.
10. Mr Gladstone and the Nationalities of the United Kingdom, 12.
11. Mr Gladstone and the Nationalities of the United Kingdom, p. 20 for Lubbock, pp. 30–31 for Argyll.
12. R. Finlay, ‘Scotland and Devolution, 1880–1945’, in D. Tanner, C. Williams, W. P. Griffiths, A. Edwards (eds), Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, 1885–1939 (Manchester, 2006), 27–44.
13. T. E. Ellis, ‘Notes for Cymru Fydd’, National Council, Newtown, 9 October 1888, in T. E. Ellis (and A. J. Ellis), Speeches and Addresses by the Late T. E. Ellis (Wrexham, 1912), 187–93, quotations at 193, 189.
14. A. Webb, Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies: Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature (Cardiff, 2013), 93. For the Growth of Nationalism, see Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, 114–21 and K. O. Morgan, ‘Welsh Nationalism: The Historical Background’, Journal of Contemporary History 6, no. 1 (1971), 153–72.
15. Kearney, British Isles, 290–91. In 1937, Davies suggested that undergraduate students in Wales’s four university colleges ‘largely support the Party’, but that ‘the industrial area of South Wales has not been captured’; see Davies, My Wales (1937), 278.
16. W. B. Dawkins, The Place of the Welsh in the History of Britain (London, 1889), 5–6. For a detailed discussion of Dawkins, see Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’.
17. Dawkins, Place of the Welsh (1889), 5–6, 9–10, 14–15.
18. Dawkins, Place of the Welsh (1889), 36–7.
19. Dawkins, Place of the Welsh (1889), 45–7.
20. Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’, 929–30.
21. Munro, British Race (1899), 186.
22. Dawkins, Place of the Welsh (1889). This passage is also quoted in Manias, ‘ Our Iberian Forefathers’, 929–30.
23. Dawkins, Place of the Welsh (1889), 48.
24. Munro, British Race (1899), 203.
25. Mandler, English National Character, 118.
26. Renan, ‘Poetry of the Celtic Races’ (1896), 5–9.
27. Arnold, Study of Celtic Literature (1900), 81–4.
28. Champion, ‘Celt in Archaeology’, 69–73.
29. Arnold, Study of Celtic Literature (1900), 81–4.
30. Mandler, English National Character, 118.
31. G. Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain (London, 1884), 228–9.
32. Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain (1884), 229.
33. T. W. Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (New York, 1911), viii.
34. W. and E. Sharp, Lyra Celtica (Edinburgh, 1896), xxiii–xxvii.
35. J. Leerssen, ‘Englishness, Ethnicity and Matthew Arnold’, European Journal of English Studies 10, no. 1 (2006), 63–79, at 69–70.
36. Ellis, ‘Celtic Spirit in Literature’ (1927), 221, 224–6, 232–5.
37. J. C. Roger, Celticism A Myth (London, 1884), 3, 12.
38. Roger, Celticism (1884), x.
39. J. M. Robertson, The Saxon and the Celt: A Study in Sociology (London, 1897), pp. ix–xii, 2, the preamble, and chapter 1.
40. W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (London, 1892), 397.
41. Robertson, Saxon and Celt (1897), v–vi, x.
42. E. Thomas, Beautiful Wales (London, 1905), 10–15, quotations at 11. This is discussed in Webb, Edward Thomas, 113, 143.
43. Robertson, Saxon and Celt (1897), xiii.
44. Morton, In Search of England (1931), see the opening of chapter 4.
45. Leerssen, ‘Englishness, Ethnicity and Matthew Arnold’, 68–9. James Urry notes that this idea had been posited since the 1830s, see his Before Social Anthropology, 84.
46. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 208.
47. K. T. Hoppen, ‘Nationalist Mobilisation and Governmental Attitudes: Geography, Politics and Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c.1750-c.1850, ed. L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (Manchester, 1997), 162–78, at 164–5.
48. A. L. Salmon, The Little Guides: Cornwall, 6th edn (London, 1927 [1903]), 49.
49. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, 20–21, 95.
50. Quotation from Dawkins, Place of the Welsh (1889), 46–7; also see Jenkinson’s North Wales (1878), xxvi.
51. Baddeley and Ward, Thorough North Wales I (1889), 150.
52. D. T. Williams, ‘A Linguistic Map of Wales According to the 1931 Census, with Some Observations on its Historical and Geographical Setting’, The Geographical Journal 89, no. 2 (1937), 146–51, at 149–50. For the interwar period, see Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, 245. Seaside towns on the north Wales coast were also, however, ‘common venues for national eisteddfodau’; see P. Borsay, ‘Welsh Seaside Resorts: Historiography, Sources and Themes’, Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru/Welsh Historical Review 24, no. 2 (2008), 92–119, at 116–17.
53. Davies, My Wales (1937), 246.
54. Leerssen ‘Celticism’, 11–12. These contradictions have also been recognised in the sixteenth-century creation of a Protestant Welsh Bible to aid the survival of the language alongside ‘official discrimination against and social scorn for that language’; see Williams, The Welsh in their History, 193. Luke Gibbons used the term ‘benevolent colonialism’, in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork, 1996), 156.
55. R. A. S. MacAlister, ‘Ancient Geography’, in Connaught, ed. G. Fletcher (Cambridge, 1922), 1–4, at 4.
56. Ellis, ‘Men of Cornwall’ (April 1897), 328.
57. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 206.
58. Batsford and Fry, Face of Scotland (1934), 11.
59. Morton, In Search of Wales (1936), 66–9.
60. Ward and Lock’s North Wales (1883), 69–70.
61. Baddeley and Ward, Thorough North Wales I (1889), xv.
62. E. Vale, ‘Wales: The Spirit and the Face’, in The Beauty of Britain, ed. J. B. Priestley (London, 1935), 160–76, at 161.
63. E. D. Jordan, Black’s Guide to Ireland, 23rd edn (London, 1900), xxx.
64. Lambert, Penguin Guides: Cornwall (1939), 22.
65. M. J. B. Baddeley, ed., Thorough Guide Series. The Northern Highlands and Islands, 2nd edn (London, 1884), v–vi.
66. Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), introduction, 55.
67. Fleure, ‘Land of Wales’ (1922), xxvi.
68. For an exception, see H. Fulton, ‘Matthew Arnold and the Canon of Medieval Welsh Literature’, The Review of English Studies, New Series 63, no. 259 (April 2012), 204–24.
69. Ellis ‘Notes for Cymru Fydd’, 1888, 190–93.
70. T. E. Ellis, ‘The Influence of the Celt in the Making of Britain’, Manchester, 13 January 1889, in T. E. Ellis, T. E. (and A. J. Ellis), Speeches and Addresses by the Late T. E. Ellis (Wrexham, 1912), 85–115, at 85. In a meeting of the Society for the Utilisation of the Welsh Language in 1886, Ellis claimed that Arnold had reversed his view on the Welsh language. See ‘The Carnarvon Eisteddfod’, South Wales Daily News, 15 September 1886, 3.
71. Yeats, ‘Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897), 272.
72. In contrast to Wales, Colin Kidd has argued that the awkward combination of Highland Gaelic and Lowland Teutonist identities stymied Scottish nationalism. See Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology’, 45–68.
73. O. Edwards, A Short History of Wales (London, 1906), 8–9.
74. P. Readman, ‘The Place of the Past in English Culture, c.1890–1914’, Past and Present 186, no. 1 (2005), 147–99, at 158–63, 68–70.
75. Koshar, ‘Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities’, 339.
76. P. Readman, ‘Living in a British Borderland: Northumberland and the Scottish Borders in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Borderlands in World History, ed. P. Readman, C. Radding and C. Bryant (Basingstoke, 2014), 169–91, especially 182–4, 186–7. Also see Readman, Storied Ground, 52–89. ‘Blood-soaked’ landscapes quotation from page 59. For the compatibility of an assertive Scottish nationalism within the union, see C. Kidd, Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2008), 261–2.
77. Norway, Devon and Cornwall (1897), 236.
78. Norway, Devon and Cornwall (1897), 127, 133–4; Scott, Corners of Cornwall (1911), 161–3.
79. Morton, In Search of England (1931), 85–7.
80. Black’s Guide to the Duchy of Cornwall, 13th edn (Edinburgh, 1885), xii; for the letter, Tregellas, Cornwall (1878), 10.
81. Harper, Cornish Coast (South) (1910), 113.
82. GWR, Cornish Riviera (1905), 45.
83. G. Beadle, ‘Foreword’, in The West in English History, ed. A. L. Rowse (London, 1949), 5–6.
84. Quotation from Tregellas, Cornwall (1878), 3; list from Ward and Baddeley, Thorough Guide: South Devon and South Cornwall (1924), 13.
85. Muirhead, The Blue Guides: England (1920), 180; GWR, Cornish Riviera (1905), 34.
86. Salmon, Little Guides: Cornwall (1905), 50–53; R. A. J. Walling, The West Country (New York, 1935), 28; W. H. Tregellas, Cornish Worthies: Sketches of Some Eminent Cornish Men and Families, vol. 1 (London, 1884), xv; For lesser known characters, see S. Baring-Gould, Cornish Characters and Strange Events (London, 1909).
87. Ward and Lock’s North Wales (1883), 5, 18–21.
88. Eyre-Todd, Through England and Scotland (1903), 81–2, 87.
89. For ‘plundering’, see Marks, Gallant Little Wales (1912), viii; for the ways in which ‘North Wales May Be Invaded’, see Ward and Lock’s North Wales (1883), 2. For similar references to Ireland, see Farquharson, ‘The British Tourist’ (1896), 339; London and North Western Railway, Ireland for the Holidays (London, 1911), 3; London and North Western Railway, Ireland for the Holidays (London, 1914), 3.
90. Piggott, Burrow’s North Wales (c.1923), 47.
91. Eyre-Todd, Through England and Scotland (1903), 81–2.
92. Eyre-Todd, Through England and Scotland (1903), 86–7. Also see Ward and Lock’s North Wales (1883), 20. Stawell places this event in Rhuddlan Castle, and, with more sympathy for the Welsh understanding of this event, describes it as a ‘historical joke’ played by Edward I ‘upon the Welsh nation’; see Stawell, Motor Tours in Wales (1909), 84–5.
93. Ward and Lock’s North Wales (1883), 20.
94. J. S. Ellis, ‘Reconciling the Celt: British National Identity, Empire, and the 1911 Investiture of the Prince of Wales’, Journal of British Studies 37, no. 4 (1998), 391–418, at 393.
95. Ellis, ‘Reconciling the Celt’, passim.
96. Stewart, ‘Celticism’, 152, 159 n98.
97. Cardiff National Pageant, accessed 1 February 2025, https://
historicalpageants .ac .uk /pageants /1133 /; Conway, accessed 1 February 2025, https:// historicalpageants .ac .uk /pageants /1040 /. 98. Harlech, accessed 1 February 2025, http://
www .historicalpageants .ac .uk /pageants /1287 /, and Aberystwyth, accessed 1 February 2025, https:// historicalpageants .ac .uk /pageants /947 /. 99. Morton, In Search of Wales (1936), 63–5.
100. Morton, In Search of Wales (1936), 4.
101. Morton, In Search of Wales (1936), 71–2.
102. Morton, In Search of Wales (1936), 4.
103. G. Borrow, Wild Wales (London, 1888 [1862]), ix.
104. Jenkinson’s North Wales (1878), lix–lx.
105. Edwards, Short History of Wales (1906), 80.
106. Black’s North Wales (1883), 3.
107. J. F. Muirhead, ed., Great Britain. Handbook for Travellers by K. Baedeker, 7th edn (Leipzig, 1910), xxxiii.
108. Ward and Lock’s North Wales (1883), 21.
109. Edwards, Short History of Wales (1906), 80–81.
110. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, 110–11; M. Cragoe, Culture, Politics, and National Identity in Wales, 1832–1886 (Oxford, 2004).
111. Batsford and Fry, Face of Scotland (1934), 34–5. The etymology is contested.
112. MacBrayne, Summer Tours in Scotland (1881), 53. This etymology is also contested.
113. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 55.
114. Mitton, Black’s Scotland, North (1920), 245.
115. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 62–3.
116. Muirhead, Blue Guides: Scotland (1927), 379. For the Bloody Stone reference, see MacKinnon, How to See Skye (1937), 53. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 147.
117. MacCulloch, The Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 93.
118. MacCulloch, The Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 93.
119. MacCulloch, The Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 64, 146–7.
120. Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 52; J. R. Gold and M. M. Gold, ‘ “The Graves of Gallant Highlanders”: Memory, Interpretation and Narratives of Culloden”, History and Memory 19, no. 1 (2007), 5–38.
121. Quotations from M. J. B. Baddeley, Thorough Guide Series. The Highlands of Scotland (London, 1881), 214; also see Moncrieff and Smith Jr., Highlands and Islands (1907), 127–8.
122. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 299.
123. S. M. Penney, ed., Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Scotland, 8th edn (London, 1903), 436.
124. Batsford and Fry, Face of Scotland (1934), 37. For the powerful, romanticised associations of Culloden, see Gold and Gold, ‘ The Graves of Gallant Highlanders’.
125. The guidebooks made it clear that Charles’ association with the cave was ‘doubtful’; see A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Oban, Fort William, the Caledonian Canal, Iona, Staffa, and the Western Highlands, 4th edn (London, n.d. [1906?]), 88; Muirhead, Blue Guides: Scotland (1927), 383.
126. Muirhead, Blue Guides: Scotland (1927), 382.
127. MacRae, Guide to Skye (1921), 57.
128. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 298–9.
129. Moncrieff and Smith Jr., Highlands and Islands (1907), 128.
130. MacKinnon, How to See Skye (1937), 11–12.
131. Quigley, Highlands of Scotland (1939), 107–15.
132. J. Leerssen, ‘Introduction’, in Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation, ed. L. Jensen, J. Leerssen and M. Mathijsen (Leiden, 2010), xv–xxii, at xx. Also see J. Morrison, Painting the Nation: Identity and Nationalism in Scottish Painting, 1800–1920 (Edinburgh, 2003), 47–8.
133. MacKinnon, How to See Skye (1937), 12.
134. Womack, Improvement and Romance, 29.
135. Smith, Summer in Skye (1885), 179–80.
136. Jackson, The Two Unions, 165–6.
137. MacKinnon, How to see Skye (1937), 12.
138. Mackie and Finlay, Complete Scotland (1933), 36.
139. For military casualties as a Scottish contribution to empire, see M. Pittock, ‘ “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: The Scot in English Eyes Since 1707’, European Journal of English Studies 13, no. 3 (2009), 293–304, at 299; Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 52.
140. Mackie and Finlay, Complete Scotland (1933), 36.
141. MacKinnon, How to See Skye (1937), 12.
142. MacKinnon, How to See Skye (1937), 12.
143. Hill, Footsteps of Dr Johnson (1890), 181.
144. The knot of ribbons worn by Jacobite supporters, to distinguish them from the black cockades worn by Hanoverian supporters.
145. Morton, In Search of Scotland (1931 [1929]), 188–93.
146. Black’s Ireland (1877), 269–70, quoting H. Dutton, A Statistical and Agricultural Survey of Galway (Dublin, 1824), 258.
147. Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), 239.
148. Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), 239.
149. Quotations from Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), introduction, 53; other examples in Jordan, Black’s Ireland (1900), 205; Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), 205; Mitton, Black’s Galway, Connemara (1912), 206; Murray’s Ireland (1878), 182; Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), 230; Ivatts, Western Highlands (Connemara) (1869), n.p.; J. O’Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger, eds, The Sunny Side of Ireland: How to See It by the Great Southern and Western Railway, 2nd edn (London, 1903), 235–45.
150. Jackson, The Two Unions, 197.
151. James McConnel, Irish Nationalism, the Cult of the Irish Brigade, and the Great War (Forthcoming, Liverpool University Press), chapter 5.
152. Jackson, The two Unions, 170, 351. For a detailed history of Irish military tradition, see T. Bartlett and K. Jeffrey, ed., A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1997).
153. Jackson, The Two Unions, 351.
154. Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), introduction, 53, 55. The Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 and the Land Acts are not mentioned by name, but the text refers to recent legislative changes in ‘the management of local affairs’ and ‘property’.
155. Stevenson, Charm of Ireland (1914), 331–6.
156. Stevenson, Charm of Ireland (1914), 331–6.
157. De Bovet, Tour in Ireland (1891), 204.
158. Curtis, One Irish Summer (1909), 432; Stevenson, Charm of Ireland (1914), 346, 353.
159. S. Gwynn, Ireland in Ten Days (London, 1935), 7.
160. For the trade wars, see Lord Dunsany, My Ireland (London, 1937), 162–3, 270–71; Morton, In Search of Ireland (1932), 229–30.
161. C. Kidd, ‘Sentiment, Race and Revival: Scottish Identities in the Aftermath of Enlightenment’, in A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c.1750-c.1850, ed. L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (Manchester, 1997), 110–26, at 120.
162. Salmon, Little Guides: Cornwall (1905), 19–21.
163. Bradley, Highways and Byways in North Wales (1898), 257–8; Black’s North Wales (1883), 53–8.
164. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 224–5; Pennell and Pennell, Journey to the Hebrides (1889), 123.