Thomas Pennant’s Highlands

Abstract Thomas Pennant’s two Scottish Tours stabilized the generic norms for writing about the Highlands in the period, for which reason they lie at the heart of the book. The Welsh traveller sought to appease Scottish public opinion by publishing a favourable account of a nation in the early throes of improvement, combining the personal authority of the informed traveller’s eye with the encyclopaedic protocols of enlightenment knowledge, gleaned from correspondence and pre-circulated questionnaires to Highland ministers, gentlemen, and naturalists. Pennant was the first traveller to offer an adequate visual documentation of Scotland: his 1772 Tour contains ninety-one engraved plates, many of them the work of his artist Moses Griffith. Notable here, especially in connection with the previous chapter, is Pennant’s ‘vision at Ardmaddie’ at the end of his 1772 Voyage to the Hebrides, when he is visited by an Ossianic spectre critical of Highland landlords for abandoning their duties of trusteeship in pursuit of personal profit.