On Returning to the Walk North with Keats

After many years the author returns to follow Keats’s 1818 walking tour with his friend Charles Brown through the north of England to Scotland to find that though many iconic sites remain the same, much has changed, including her own perspective as she now sees Scotland as the primary destination of the travellers. The internet has come along, getting places and researching information has changed, and significantly, since the author follows the tour camera in hand, photography has moved to digital. The touchstones of the tour—Wordsworth’s home at Rydal Mount, the grave and mausoleum of Burns in St Michael’s Churchyard, Ailsa Craig on the horizon opposite Girvan, Ayrshire with Burns’s cottage, Brig o’ Doon, Kirk Alloway—all have a refreshed lustre. Following Keats’s side trip to Northern Ireland, Belfast has blossomed into a vibrant city free of armed guards at checkpoints. Oban, always busy, now has traffic signs in Gaelic and English and on the ferry to Mull, some conversations could be heard in Gaelic. The farmhouse called Derry-na-Cullen on Mull appears more skeletal and overcome with green growth. The church at Inveraray is more accessible and documented. The old Letterfinlay Inn on Loch Lochy has been landscaped without, remodelled within, and put up for sale as a five-bedroom country house. The abbey was missing from Fort Augustus. The dock from which Keats sailed home to London in Cromarty remained as he had seen it. Only the twenty-first-century beholder had changed.