ABSTRACT
It seems natural to travellers to write of their travels. They mostly wish, as John Caprove put it, to add their own ‘smal pyping of swech straunge sites as I have seyn’. 1 The tourists of Britain are no exception. Long winter evenings were spent in transcribing the notes taken in the previous summer's tour, and they produced their accounts, sometimes for publication, often for circulation in manuscript form amongst friends and neighbours. The simplicity and spontaneity of their writings stand in refreshing contrast to much other tourist literature, and when other travellers’ tales grow tedious it is good to turn again to these eye-witness accounts of the English countryside which they knew and loved.
