ABSTRACT

Tourists’ reflections on nature in Scotland include many such visions of the countryside as a contemporary Arcadia. Scenery was Scotland’s most compelling lure to visitors. A desire to see the allegedly untouched mountains, waterfalls, lochs, and glens of the Highlands and Lowlands was the chief reason most tourists gave for their journeys. In 1805 the ‘very beautiful’ Clyde valley, enriched with gentlemen’s seats, ‘excellently’ cultivated and richly clothed with fine trees, reminded Joseph Mawman of England. Seventy-one years later Edmund Gosse lay in the long grass under a ‘pastoral’ beech tree near the Lowland town of Linlithgow, and reflected that the area was ‘very charming in a quiet, unobtrusive English way'. Victorian men participated in a range of what Maxwell termed ‘manly pastimes’ in the Highlands: hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, climbing mountains. Renditions of parts of the Highlands, such as the Cuillins, as ‘desolate’, ‘sterile’, and ‘inaccessible’ implicitly elevated the achievements of those who went there.