ABSTRACT
Everyone knows that it was Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (1810) that made the Trossachs and Loch Katrine into the epitome of Romantic Scotland for readers, writers and tourists from Britain and Europe. But I want to suggest here that the cultural work of turning these places into an exemplary Romantic locality was begun nearly two decades earlier in the parish report on Callander that was included in the massive twenty-one-volume Statistical Account of Scotland, edited by Sir John Sinclair and published in Edinburgh between 1791 and 1799. 1 Although some nineteenth-century writers suggested that the Reverend James Robertson of Callander was the first writer to ‘discover’ the Trossachs, the bulk of academic work on the explosion of interest in the people, culture and localities of Highland Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century has focused on the increasing number of published tours and guide books in the period. 2 While some of these tours and guidebooks were written by Scots, they were usually, like the increasing number of English and European travellers to the Scottish Highlands, merely visitors to the localities they wrote about. The distinctive feature of the 938 parish reports in the Statistical Account of Scotland is that they were written by parish ministers who typically combined intimate local knowledge with a university education in one of the centres of the Scottish Enlightenment. As a consequence, in answering the questions put to them by Sinclair many of these ministers produced parish reports that wove together a variety of responses to their localities, commenting on history, typography, geology and mineral resources, agriculture, antiquities, flora and fauna, population, housing, schooling and so on. In this way, the Statistical Account of Scotland added up to a massive project of national self-representation in which the local features of all the parishes of Scotland were described and made available to readers. As Donald J. Withrington suggests, The Statistical Account of Scotland provides ‘a complete and at that time unique survey of the state of the whole country, locality by locality’. 3
