A tour in Scotland, MDCCLXIX

by Thomas Pennant

Thomas Pennant was one of the most eminent naturalists of the 18th century, friend to Linnaeus and Voltaire, as well as one of the finest travel writers of his age. This book is the record of the first of two trips he made through the north of England and Scotland. Probably inspired by Martin Martin's great work of the previous century (see title below), Pennant's two tours -- along with Boswell and Johnson and Edmund Burt's Letters from the North of Scotland (also available from Dufour) -- form the seminal writing on Scotland of this period and represent the first major accounts of the Highlands after the suppression of the Jacobite rising in 1745. His work is much more than simply a topography of the country; it represents a desire to introduce a land which was very much terra incognita to a southern audience. The fairness, acuteness, and range of his observation is almost without parallel for the time, and his work is an invaluable mine on the history, traditions, customs, and geography of North Britain on the edge of vast and irrevocable change.

388 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2000

About the author

Thomas Pennant was a Welsh naturalist, traveller, writer and antiquarian. He was born and lived his whole life at his family estate, Downing Hall near Whitford, Flintshire in Wales.

Reviews

[Ronnie Strachan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a stranger in transit within a wild and only recently tamed country, Thomas Pennant provides a very worthy - if fleeting - account of many of the particulars of North Britain, through firsthand exchanges with its nobler, more learned residents. Pennant was a naturalist, so the finer details of fish and birds are not spared within these pages, nor the lay of the land in all its beauty and barrenness. Pennant leaves the islands to Johnson and Boswell, and restricts his anthropological traverse to the mainland. A good read if you're fond of early travelogues.