Travel Writing’s Debatable Land

This chapter provides the first in-depth examination of early travel accounts of Dumfriesshire and Galloway. Scholarship on Scottish travel writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has focused on the Highlands and the Hebrides, which were reimagined in this period as an exotic destination. Yet southwest Scotland, on the western limit of the Anglo-Scottish border, presents a different and distinctive case. Neither familiar to English tourists, nor fulfilling their idealised expectations of Scottish otherness, it remained stubbornly in-between. While offering a panoramic survey of the material that ranges from journals to guidebooks, the chapter spotlights key tours by Thomas Pennant, William Gilpin, Robert Heron, Dorothy Wordsworth and John Keats. These move chronologically from the gentlemanly travel popularised by Pennant in the early 1770s, to literary tourism inspired by Robert Burns in the 1800s and 1810s, demonstrating the cumulative contribution of travel writing to the emergent cultural production of regions.