Chapter 5 - ‘Another View of Ireland’

Summary

5. In ‘“Another View of Ireland”: Tourism and War on the “Irish Road” in 1790s Wales’, Mary-Ann Constantine notes the coalescence of ‘a shared “tourist” aesthetic’ across Britain and Ireland encompassing a familiar array of images and subjects. She goes on, however, to complicate narratives of British cultural interconnection by acknowledging a deeper history of connections across the archipelago and then discussing the crossings of travellers between Ireland and Wales during the 1790s, before and after the United Irish rebellion of 1798. With reference to the writings of Catherine Hutton and Elizabeth Smith, she considers how an established tourist site such as Caernarfon was understood not only as shadowed by the violence of the past but also as a destination for Irish migrants fleeing the strife of the present. Catherine Hutton’s tour, she shows, additionally demonstrates the reverberation of the events of the French Revolution, because in her account of ordering her accommodation in Caernarfon, Hutton invokes the tragic figure of the Girondin Madame Roland, whose memoirs record the conditions of her imprisonment prior to her execution at the guillotine.