ABSTRACT
Lee’s walking tour has a strongly scientific character in keeping with the contemporary figure of the scientific traveller. Scientific travellers joined in the new appeal of British and Irish landscapes, particularly those of Scotland and Ireland, as presenting fresh fields of study. Provincial scientific studies appealed to the reading public. They contained ‘new’ information and often included lavish illustrations and maps, all presented in tandem with observations on the exotic Celts who inhabited Ireland, Wales and the Scottish Highlands and islands.3 British scientific travellers employed the unifying language of the Linnaean taxonomy to symbolically connect the geographical and climatic diversity of the natural history of imperial territories and colonies. The Welshborn naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726-98) is an excellent example of the emerging genre of domestic British scientific description. Taken as a whole, his works positioned Scottish and Irish natural history within a broader, global context, but more significantly, his A Tour in Scotland (1771) and A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides (1774) communicated his own original observations, unlike his Indian Zoolog y (1769) and Arctic Zoolog y (1784). (He never travelled to either the Arctic or India.) It is therefore significant that Lee referenced Pennant’s history of his local parish in Wales, indicating that Lee was at least acquainted with current trends in domestic scientific travel and its methodologies.
