Introduction
By the late eighteenth-century a new breed of visitors was travelling to Scotland to enjoy the scenic pleasures of the petit and long tours. More akin to modern leisure tourists and drawn from across the social spectrum, they now included large numbers of women. This final section explores how the experience of these travellers was shaped by the literary landscapes of James Macpherson, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and other writers in the romantic vein.
The estate landscape
Eager to display their recently improved seat and to stimulate the local economy, several landowners actively promoted the growth of domestic tourism, building inns, roads and bridges. Through the commission of paintings, and their public exhibition in London or reproduction as prints in travel accounts, Scotland’s localities were presented as places worth visiting, sketching, and writing about.
Sites such as Dunkeld, Taymouth and Inveraray in particular were major destinations on the so-called petit tour. Visitors were drawn by a rich variety of historic and wondrous sights, framed in spectacular and theatrical ways that would make them must-see sights. Architectural ruins and new, modern buildings were all made part of the estate’s designed landscape, while natural phenomena such as waterfalls were stage managed to bring out emotional reactions or conjure up a scenery reminiscent of Ossian.
Picturesque and Sublime Scotland
In the summer of 1776, just three years after Johnson and Boswell’s Scottish tour, the Rev. William Gilpin embarked on a two-week petit tour of the Highlands in search of ‘picturesque beauty’ and ‘untamed’ landscapes. While Gilpin’s writings did much to popularise a taste for mountain scenery in the British Isles, in Scotland it was arguably Ossian that had first imbued the cataracts, crags and peaks of the Scottish Highlands with a rich mythology. And in the following decades, the rising popularity of Scottish Poets and writers such as Robert Burns and Walter Scott meant that in Scotland, the aesthetics of the sublime – or grandeur and horror which excited thoughts and emotive states – was expressed as poetry rather than theory.
The Satirical Eye
Tourism overall was subject to parody practically from the beginning, with James Boswell and Samuel Johnson’s tour prompting a series of caricatures over the following decade. Picking on celebrity travellers, on far from respectable tourists, and on the penchant for picturesque sketching among others, they target the affected attitudes of tourists who fancied themselves as antiquarians, naturalists or artists.
The discovery of the Trossachs
A locally famous beauty spot, by 1794 Loch Katrine sported ‘two huts of wicker work … for the accommodation of strangers’ who wished to admire and sketch ‘this wild and picturesque landscape’. Made accessible by a new road, blasted out of the rocks, these huts must have framed Scott’s perspective on the lake, published in his poem of 1810, The Lady of the Lake. An instant best-seller, the poem would give new resonance to the scenic attractions of the Trossachs.
In the summer of 1810, over 500 carriages had allegedly already come through to this ‘far-famed spot’. And in 1818, an angry boatman on Loch Lomond was heard complaining that ‘ever since [Scott] wrote “The Lady of the Lake” . . . everybody goes to that filthy hole Loch Catrine, than comes round by Luss, and I have only had two gentlemen to guide this blessed season . . . The devil confound his ladies and his lakes, say I!’
By 1820, the inn in Callendar, the closest town to Loch Katrine, provided copies of all Scott’s poems, together with maps of the areas they described, prepared by the landlord of the inn.
The rise of the ‘leisure traveller’ or modern tourist
As early as 1788, Elizabeth Diggle wrote in her journal of a tour from London to the highlands of Scotland ‘All the world is travelling to Scotland’. Originating from within and outwith Scotland, this new breed of travellers came from the upper, middle and professional classes. They rarely ventured north without readying themselves for their adventures through careful consultation of existing pictorial references, reading of relevant publications, and of course packing ‘portable knick-nack’.
The objects gathered in this section provide a glimpse into some of the item travellers would take with them before venturing north.