ABSTRACT
Loch Katrine has long been recognized as a romantic locality; indeed, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was arguably the most romantic locality of them all. The story of its evolution as a premier tourist attraction describes a major cultural transition in the sorts of pleasures open to the contemporary traveller. From being viewed at the end of the eighteenth century increasingly in visual and generic terms, as a romantic landscape which conveniently melded the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque, Loch Katrine came by the second decade of the nineteenth century to function as a quintessential romantic locality, charged with specific, unique and local meaning. By the middle of the twentieth century, this meaning had decayed and the area was rapidly dwindling back into landscape, perceived as merely a rather pretty, rather out-of-the-way place. 1
