3 - At the Edge: Gothic Extremities in Britain and Ireland

Summary

By the later eighteenth century, the domestic Picturesque Tour across the British Isles and Irish Isles had emerged as an alternative to the Grand Tour, with remote parts of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales offering exciting destinations for tourists. These regions would become highly attractive during the Napoleonic Wars, when much of Europe was inaccessible for British travellers. Exploration of the wild peripheries of Britain and Ireland was fuelled by the growth of antiquarian interest in Gothic architecture and ruins, and a fascination with the sublimity of nature. Continental Europe offered awe-inspiring landscapes, medieval cathedrals and classical ruins, but William Gilpin's writing on the picturesque suggested that rural Britain could match the wonders of Grand Tourism and the Alps. Domestic picturesque tourism inspired by Gilpin and others provided the opportunity for aesthetic discovery and encounters with cultural difference at manageable risk for the traveller: these ‘localised itineraries’ appealed to a desire ‘to discover closer at hand what is unfamiliar, yet at the same time to harmonize, homogenize, and extend the purview of home’ (Colbert, 2011: 1). Malcolm Andrews has noted ‘something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, “capturing” wild scenes, and “fixing” them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing-room walls’ (Andrews, 1990: 67). As Benjamin Colbert comments, this privileged perspective could ‘elide all questions of identity politics into an aesthetics of landscape’ (Colbert, 2011: 2).

The portrait of the ‘unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich’ and Edward Waverley at the end of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), presenting the Scottish Highlands as a place of raw beauty and glamorous adventure, might appear to epitomise such a tendency:

It was a large and animated painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the back-ground.

It was taken from a spirited sketch, drawn while they were in Edinburgh by a young man of genius, and had been painted on a full length scale by an eminent London artist … Beside this painting were hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war. The whole piece was generally admired (Scott, 2011: 361).