An anatomy of early Welsh tourism

How many tourists visiting Wales today, I wonder, ever think about their early predecessors?  I mean those who first arrived, in surprisingly large numbers, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  How many are aware that these travellers, rather than composing Instagram posts, blogs and TikTok videos, would most likely have busied themselves drawing in their sketchbooks or writing their impressions in journals, and possibly publishing the latter as ‘tours’ once they got home?

The number of the ‘tours’ that survive is impressive.  Michael Freeman, who has assembled a massive online collection of primary sources on early Welsh tourism, calculates that between 1760 and 1820 there are 470 manuscript and 162 published tours.  These form the raw material used by Mary-Ann Constantine in her recent study of Wales through the eyes of visitors, Curious travellers: writing the Welsh tour, 1760-1820.  It’s a book, dedicated in part to Michael Freemen, that ranges widely across many areas – culture and language, landscape and the environment, politics and religion, industry and trade and much more – in a way that reflects the multifarious content of the tours themselves.

Curious travellers is cunningly shaped.  After an introductory chapter and a summary of travel writing in Wales before the eighteenth century, it describes a clockwise tour around Wales, each chapter located in a specific region and focussed on a specific set of themes.  Fittingly, the tour starts in the north-east, with the virtual inventor of the Welsh tour, Thomas Pennant, who lived in Downing Hall, Flintshire.  It’s interesting that a genre populated mostly by English writers took its lead from the work of a native Welshman – just as landscape painting in Wales, also an English-dominated field, began with a Welshman, Richard Wilson.  Pennant’s highly detailed Tours, published between 1778 and 1783, became an authoritative text for later tourists.  These writers tended to lean heavily on his accounts of places, especially if they’d failed to experience them at first hand.  In fact, quoting passages, sentences and words from earlier tours became a general habit, so that tourist literature turns into a ‘riot of intertextuality’.

Among the themes Mary-Ann discusses are borders (geographical, political, linguistic, cultural), William Gilpin and picturesque travel, the wonders and horrors of iron and coal working, pilgrims ancient and modern, estate tours, the lure of ruins, mountains and their meanings, and the links, sometimes sinister and unrecognised, between the domestic tour and overseas trade (including trade in humans).  She treats these subjects, and the tourists who write about them, with subtlety and sensitivity, often digging beneath surface meanings to discover new interpretations and associations.

The book is one product of a large project, also called Curious Travellers, which unearthed many texts and images previously hidden or overlooked, and Mary-Ann makes the most of some of these.  The artist Thomas Hornor was new to me, and his weird picture ‘Spirit of the Vale of Neath’ a revelation.  Richard Gough was a figure I knew about, but not his account of a tour of south Wales.  Possibly the most remarkable find is the manuscript journal written by Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) of his long, indirect trek on foot from London to the Vale of Glamorgan in 1802, part conversation with himself, part diatribe against the powerful.  It contains a delicious satirical inversion of the usual trajectory of the English visitor to Wales, in which the inferior and unsatisfactory characteristics of English towns are replaced by the hospitality and gentility Iolo encounters once he crosses the border into Wales.

By contrast, the story of Hafod, an eighteenth-century landscaped Eden set below the bleak peatbogs of Elenydd, is a well-trodden path for researchers.  But Mary-Ann finds new things to say about how its creator, Thomas Johnes, nurtured the image of his house and estate in a strikingly modern way.  You could fairly call him a predigital ‘influencer’. It’s long been known that Johnes opened an inn at Devil’s Bridge in the 1790s, in order to cater for the tourist trade, while also keeping visitors at arm’s length.  But it’s now clear that he cultivated writers of tours so that, like Tripadvisor commentators, they would give Hafod favourable write-ups.  He invited potential tour writers to visit his house, requested proofs of their books, corrected errors in their texts, and helped them by buying up copies for resale.  He even made alterations to the Hafod estate to conform with a landscape imagined by one of the tour writers, George Cumberland.

Early tourists came to Wales to appreciate its scenery, or to botanise, or, like Michael Faraday, learn about its industrial innovations.  They seldom came to engage with Welsh people, as, say, George Borrow did a few decades later (what a pity that Borrow’s Wild Wales (1862), ‘that brilliant and impossible work’, lies outside the scope of Mary-Ann’s book).  As a result, Welsh men and women encountered by them often appear to conform to writers’ stereotypes.  Mary Morgan visited coal miners in south Pembrokeshire in the 1790s.  In describing them she resorted to exotic images of primitive peoples in distant lands:

The miners sit upon their hams, as the Indians do.  In Byron’s voyage there is a print of what he calls a whigwam or Indian hut, which will give you a perfect idea of these habitations; and the people, except that they are clothed, bear a strong resemblance to the natives of Terra Del Fuego.

Since almost all visitors were ignorant of the Welsh language (again, Borrow was an exception), communication with ordinary people was difficult, again giving rise to generalised assumptions.  Rural workers could appear as aboriginal people undefiled by civilisation, while industrial workers often struck visitors, more critically, as savage, poor and dangerous.  This period saw the rapid rise of Calvinistic Methodism.  Gatherings of ‘Jumpers’, ecstatic worshippers unrestrained by decorum or the rules of an established church, excited suspicion and revulsion, and tourists sometimes (wrongly) associated them with political subversion.  Unable to understand what was said or sung, they concentrated their horrified attention on the frenzied gestures, facial expressions and vocal pitches of Methodist congregations.

Women formed a very small minority of tour writers, and one wonders whether, if we had more accounts by them, impressions of Welsh people might have been rather different from those of the men.  Certainly, Catherine Hutton’s tours, from which Mary-Ann quotes liberally, suggest a quality of curiosity, observation and empathy lacking in many accounts by men.  Few tours were written by Welsh people themselves, but they’re richer in human interaction than outsiders’ accounts.  The text written by Edward Pugh to accompany his pictures for Cambria depicta (1816) contains numerous conversations, in Welsh and English, with the people he meets on his travels – which themselves depart from the stock routes followed by English tourists.

Towards the end of the book Mary-Ann turns to how the tour writers dealt with a concern that for us today eclipses almost all others, environmental degradation.  Many of them were certainly aware of the price to be paid for the advances in engineering and industry they were otherwise so partial to praising.  In 1814 Richard Ayton, a rare ‘coastal tourist’ with his companion artist William Daniell, described the total loss of vegetation at Amlwch as a result of the mining of copper at Mynydd Parys, and analysed the environmental and human effects of unbridled profit-taking:

Of the general good that has been produced by the discovery of these mines I am not prepared to speak, but they have proved a sad curse to this neighbourhood, and, after have been worked almost to exhaustion, and yielding an enormous amount of wealth, they leave the people in want, and the country a wilderness.

This period, 1760-1820, marked the start of the ‘anthropocene’, when the earth’s climate and environment began to be so fundamentally affected by human activity that it leaves traces in the geological record.  On the final page of her book Mary-Ann alludes to recent travel literature in Wales that has become permeated, inevitably, with anxiety and even panic over climate change and loss of biodiversity – just one example of how today’s writers on travel in Wales, for all their differences, often echo the works of their predecessors over two centuries ago.

Curious travellers is packed with riches for anyone interested in Wales during the Romantic period and in how Wales has been seen from the outside.  It doesn’t cover all possible angles.  The question of Romanticism and its effect on tour writing – as exemplified by the very different ways in which Joseph Hucks and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge treat landscape and nature during their 1794 tour – isn’t explicitly explored.  It would be interesting to hear how tourism routes evolved, or didn’t evolve (some parts of Wales seem consistently ‘off-road’), and how destinations and themes changed over time.  But these quibbles don’t matter when you consider how this book, on almost every page, sets off small, exciting mental explosions in the reader’s mind, as it reveals new insights and makes unexpected connections.

Mary-Ann Constantine, Curious travellers: writing the Welsh tour, 1760-1820, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, ISBN 9780198852124, £103.00. [Shame on the publisher for pricing the book beyond the reach of most individuals.]