The Home Tour

Abstract

Although the previous chapters were concerned with travel abroad, there was naturally also a tradition in the British Isles of travel within one’s own country, such as the local pilgrimage to destinations like Canterbury. However, home tours did not come into fashion until relatively late; as John Edmund Vaughan (1974, p. 54) suggests, the Napoleonic Wars encouraged this kind of journey in Britain because they made it difficult for Britons to travel on the Continent.¹ Thus accounts of domestic travel are initially significantly fewer in number compared with those relating to the Grand Tour. ‘Before the 1750s’, writes Charles Batten (1978, p. 93), ‘surprisingly few Englishmen of wealth and social position had traveled extensively throughout their own country, and fewer still had described their homeland in accounts of their travels.’ Notwithstanding, the British Isles were travelled with a specific historical and geographical interest as early as the sixteenth century: The habit of touring their native land began in the sixteenth century; it is a Tudor phenomenon. Better roads and improved cartography were making travel easier and safer, but the motive force was pride in the greatness of Tudor England, and a curiosity both in the historic roots of that greatness and its contemporary manifestations’ (Moir, 1964, p. xiv).

[1] [M]y Landlady brought me one of the West Country tarts, this was the first I met with, though I had asked for them in many places in Sommerset and Devonshire, its [sic] an apple pye with a custard all on the top …; they scald their creame and milk in most parts of those countrys and so its a sort of clouted creame as we call it, with a little sugar, and soe put on the top of the apple pye; I was much pleased with my supper tho’ not with the custome of the country, which is a universall smoaking, … which was not delightfull to me when I went down to talke with my Landlady for information of any matter and customs amongst them …

Halfe a mile from hence they blow their tin which I went to see: they take the oar [ore] and pound it in a stamping mill which resembles the paper mills, and when its fine as the finest sand, some of which I saw and took, this they fling into a furnace and with it coale to make the fire, so it burns together and makes a violent heate and fierce flame, the mettle [metal] by the fire being seperated [sic] from the coale and its own drosse, being heavy falls down to a trench made to receive it, at the furnace hole below; this liquid mettle I saw them shovel up with an iron shovel and soe pour it into molds in which it cooles and soe they take it thence in sort of wedges or piggs I think they call them; its a fine mettle thus in its first melting looks like silver, I had a piece poured out and made cold for to take with me…

(Celia Fiennes, ‘My Great Journey to Newcastle and to Cornwall, 1698’, pp. 204–5)

[2] From Longleat we pursued our road through Froom to Wells. The first part of our journey presented nothing very interesting. As we approached Mendip-hills, the road divides; one branch leading over those high grounds, the other under them. We chose the latter, which afforded us, on the right, those hills for a back-ground; and on the left, an extensive distance, in which Glastonburytor, as it is called, is the most conspicuous feature.

Our approach to Wells, from the natural and incidental beauties of the scene, was uncommonly picturesque. It was a hazy evening; and the sun, declining low, was hid behind a purple cloud, which covered half the hemisphere, but did not reach the western horizon. Its lower skirts were gilt with dazzling splendor, which spread downwards, not in diverging rays, but in one uniform ruddy glow; and uniting at the bottom with the mistiness of the air, formed a rich, yet modest tint, with which Durcote-hill, projecting boldly on the left, the towers of Wells beyond it, and all the objects of the distance, were tinged; while the foreground, seen against so bright a piece of scenery, was overspread with the darkest shades of evening. The whole together invited the pencil, without soliciting the imagination. But it was a transitory scene. As we stood gazing at it, the sun sunk below the cloud, and being stripped of all its splendor by the haziness of the atmosphere, fell, like a ball of fire, into the horizon; and the whole radiant vision faded away.

(William Gilpin, Observations on the Western Parts of England, 1798, pp. 129–30)