Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760-1815

The Curious Travellers Project will collect, present and analyse a significant body of material relating to the phenomenon of the Welsh and Scottish Tour as it developed in the years c.1760-1815. It will open a window onto the vivid and often entertaining accounts of scores of 'curious travellers' who headed for the peripheries of Britain in search of the primitive, the picturesque and the sublime - and often found the foreign, and the unsettling, surprisingly close to home. Our starting point is the work of naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant of Downing (1726-1798), whose pioneering tours in Scotland and Wales (1771-1781) were widely read, directly inspiring the Highland journey of Johnson and Boswell and hundreds of others. His 'omnivorous' style, drawing on information from an imposing network of correspondents, weaves together natural history, antiquarianism, literature, history, aesthetics and politics.

Often cited as an authority or an influence, Pennant's work has received little attention in its own right: the archive is scattered and difficult to use. The first aim of the project is to catalogue the many hundreds of letters to and from Pennant, and present them in a searchable data-base. This tool will improve our knowledge of the antiquarian, scientific and literary networks of the period, and allow us to trace both Pennant's careful preparation and information gathering, and the complex development of the composite and much-revised texts of the Tours themselves.
The 'transperipheral' nature of Pennant's Tours (as a Welshman, albeit with unionist sympathies, exploring Scotland and his native Wales), along with their importance to later writers and travellers, make them an ideal point from which to investigate travel-writing from Wales and Scotland after 1760, when an improved transport infrastructure and a new sense of British identity inspired an increasingly affluent middle class to explore their national peripheries. Hundreds of published and manuscript accounts of tourist experiences form a still largely untapped resource for the study of history, material culture, literature and language. The second aim of the project is to make a generous selection of unpublished Tours of Wales and Scotland available online, each with a short contextualizing introduction and linked to a series of maps and pictures.

In the light of recent work on global exploration in this period (Cook's Pacific voyages; the travels of Joseph Banks) the parallel 'exploration' of Britain needs critical reassessment. The domestic tour was an extraordinarily successful genre, second only to novels and romances, but has been relatively little studied. Yet it arguably played an important role in the construction of national histories, both at a 'four nations' level, and in a larger British context. Travel-writing uncovered the past in the landscape, through sites (cromlechs, churches, castles) popular culture (language, costume, song, and 'national character'), objects and images (antiquities, landscapes). Because landscape-writing and antiquarianism are often seen as conservative forms, the politics of the tour as a genre in this period is rarely considered. How far, during a period of revolution and war, did native histories, and the Celtic languages, disrupt that larger narrative of Britishness and of national 'improvement'? Pennant's Tours, for example, despite his unionist stance, were readily absorbed into nationalist discourses in both Wales and Scotland. In considering how the tour genre helped to 'create' versions of British history, the project will examine travellers' engagement with vernacular Celtic cultures (poetry and song), and ask how far their perceptions were influenced by contemporary ideas from science and art.

Besides producing two new electronic resources, we will explore these issues through an informative dynamic website, 2 monographs, articles, a volume of essays, conferences, events and exhibitions.

Research into the Welsh and Scottish Tour has the potential to impact on a range of organisations in the heritage, education and tourism sectors of both countries. The project has been developed in consultation with representatives from many of these groups, and a range of events is planned to disseminate our research to various different audiences. Because the topic is so closely linked to matters of place, landscape and heritage, we envisage that many more opportunities will come up as the work progresses.

Heritage: Museums and Galleries.
Our 'book-end' conferences in 2014 and 2018 are linked into two major international exhibitions and will benefit from the wider publicity surrounding them. The first, in National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, explores visual aspects of the Tours in conjunction with an exhibition of the landscape painter Richard Wilson. The second, celebrating the tercentenary of Scotland's oldest museum, the Hunterian in Glasgow, will explore material culture and antiquities. Both exhibitions are supported by the Paul Mellon Foundation at Yale, and thus have an international dimension. Further smaller exhibitions focused on the manuscript tours are planned with both the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales, to coincide with further day-conferences. A day event with schools is planned in Ceredigion Museum for 2015 (see below). In conjunction with NLW, additional funding will be sought towards a touring exhibition in 2019, to celebrate the work of Thomas Pennant's principal artist, Moses Griffith.

Education: Schools, further education.
A joint event hosted by Ceredigion Museum will focus on the theme of 'travel in the olden days' for primary schools; this will include reading, exploring objects, and competitions for creative writing and drawing. We will also develop sections of the Curious Travellers Website in consultation with Dr Paul Evans (Deputy Head, Denbigh High) to provide resources for the secondary-level history curriculum: these will be available in both Welsh and English. In the sphere of adult education, we will contribute to the lively programmes of talks and walks organized by local history societies: we have strong links with the Thomas Pennant Society and the Edward Llwyd Society, and have an event planned with the former. The website will be freely accessible to the general public, who will benefit from access to the new research tools: the database of Pennant Correspondence, and the searchable online corpus of Welsh & Scottish Tours. When publicizing our work in the university sector, we will ensure that the site is made known to the Open University; U3A etc.

Tourism:
Pennant's quotability is nicely exemplified by the large hoarding greeting arrivals at Edinburgh Airport with his generous description of that city: 'It possesses a boldness and grandeur beyond that I have ever seen'. Naturally enough, this project presents abundant possibilities for exploring the history of tourism in Wales and Scotland, from the provision of site-specific material to an understanding of the development of tourist itineraries, and of changing expectations. We have had enthusiastic responses from bodies including Visit Scotland, Visit Wales, CADW, the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments and National Trust for Scotland. Our Creative Responses strand, which will see contemporary artists and writers retracing parts of Pennant's Tours, may be further used to enhance the tourist experience in certain places.

Media
Constantine is currently scripting a half-hour programme on the 'Welsh Tour' for BBC Radio Wales, which will raise the profile of the subject; we are also developing a pitch for a three-episode television series aimed at BBC4, using the Curious Travellers title. BBC Radio Scotland are interested in following one of the Creative Responses tours. We will use the website to publicize and blog our various events as they happen.