Introduction

Tourism is a worldwide industry of major importance to many countries. Amongst these is Scotland, where it has been a staple for a long time and indeed has both outlived and outperformed many of the traditional pillars of the Scottish economy such as shipbuilding or coal. Sources of information about holidaymaking, tourism and visitor experience are many. One of the greatest resources that the Scottish historian enjoys, as against his counterparts elsewhere in the UK, are the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. This is a parish-by-parish survey, each account being generally written by the local minister, with the First or Old Statistical Account published in the 1790s. The literature of tourism, from first-hand accounts to academic analyses, is immense and growing. Tourism history has emerged as a recognised and respectable discipline, with its own journal, when tourism was seen only as the soft end of social history, itself regarded as far from academically rigorous.