Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic FilmAccess, Identity and Landscape

Samantha Wilson

Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Film

SamanthaWilson

Charting ScottishTourism and the Early

Scenic FilmAccess, Identity and Landscape

Samantha WilsonGlasgow, Scotland

ISBN 978-3-030-39152-2 ISBN 978-3-030-39153-9 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39153-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to SpringerNature Switzerland AG 2020This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by thePublisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rightsof translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction onmicrofilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage andretrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodologynow known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that suchnames are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free forgeneral use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neitherthe publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, withrespect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have beenmade. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published mapsand institutional affiliations.

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For my mother and father, who taught me to love the Scottish landscape,even before I had the chance to set foot in it.

Acknowledgments

This book exists at the intersection of two very different projects. Thefirst was my doctoral thesis tracing the role of the natural sublime inenvironmental aesthetics and visual culture and the second a postdoctoralresearch project interrogating the historical links between the sites andcirculation of scenic films and the spatial identities of Scottish communi-ties at the turn of the century. For this reason there are several individualsand groups to thank for their commitment and contribution to this finalpiece of work.

I would first like to thank Professor Peter Rist (Concordia University)and Professor John Caughie (University of Glasgow) for their indispens-able support and insight over the course of both projects. Without bothof their contributions to different stages of this research this book wouldnot have been possible.

I would like to acknowledge Professor Martin Lefebvre (ConcordiaUniversity) whose support and comments in the early stages of this projectprovided the theoretical foundations for the rest of my research.

I am also grateful to a number of libraries and archives who madetheir resources available to me over the past several years including theMoving Image Archive at the National Library of Scotland (formerly theScottish Screen Archive), the British Film Institute, Historic EnvironmentScotland, the National Archives of Scotland, Inverclyde Council Archives,Bute Museum and the London Metropolitan Archives.

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viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Fonds deRecherche du Québec—Société et Culture whose Postdoctoral ResearchGrant funded the two year project, ‘A Trip to Bonnie Scotland: RegionalScottish Identities and the Circulation and Exhibition of Early ScenicFilms at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.’

I would like to thank the International Journal of Scottish Theatre andScreen who have graciously allowed me to include a revised version of thearticle “A Trip ‘Doon the Watter’ During the Glasgow Fair: Working ClassLeisure Patterns and the Role of the Scenic Film at the Turn of the Cen-tury” which I published in the journal in 2017. Portions of the secondand sixth chapters of this book are derived in part from Samantha Wil-son, “The Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation in Early BritishScenic Filmmaking,” published in Early Popular Visual Culture on July2nd 2016, reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading asTaylor & Francis Group, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17460654.2016.1183362?journalCode=repv20.

Lastly, I owe a particular debt of appreciation to both my parents Lauraand David Wilson and my partner Neil without whom this book wouldnot have come into being.

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Home and Away: The Rise of the Walking Tour andGuidebook 23

3 Mapping, Ordering and Recording the Tourist’sLandscape 51

4 Reclaiming Space and Fortifying Identity: Working ClassTravel During the Glasgow Fair 75

5 I Never Leave Home Without It: Amateur Filmmaking inthe Interwar Period 99

6 Conclusion 123

Index 135

ix

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This introductory chapter explores how the interplay betweenmaterial forces and aesthetic and cultural discourses paved the way fornature appreciation to be embedded within the tourism industry in Scot-land between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Severalrepresentational technologies played a role in this process including pho-tography and film. The latter, in the guise of the scenic film, renego-tiated one of the central debates surrounding first-hand contact withnature and its aesthetic parameters—that is how to frame the embodiedgaze. This question was particularly important within the Scottish contextbecause of the impact of transborder tourism and the circulation of land-scape imagery during the period. Both regional and international leisurepatterns transformed not only how individual communities moved andlooked at the spaces they called home but also how they conceptualisedtheir relationship with the natural world.

Keywords Nature appreciation · Scenic filmmaking · Aestheticphilosophy · Travel and tourism · Scotland

Jean Adamson spent her childhood holidays outside of the Highland vil-lage of Ardentinny. In her private memoirs she described that period ofher life with reverent detail. It was there in the forest that she createdher own magical world detached from the cultural and economic pres-sures that surrounded her family back home in the mining town of High

© The Author(s) 2020S. Wilson, Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Film,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39153-9_1

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Blantyre. When revisiting these memories Jean describes herself as beingcompletely “absorbed” by the natural world around her, where “Life itselfseemed to proliferate faster than at home”.1 With a heavy sense of nostal-gia, these periods of leisure became a “timeless world” with “some atavis-tic power that made us think and behave like our ancestors… extractingthe savour of life from the rhythm of nature and getting myths from thelips of the story tellers”.2 The experiences she retells and the rhetoric sheuses to do so are, of course, not entirely unique. They reflect a com-plex set of discourses and performed behaviour embedded in the founda-tions of the cultural identity of her home country of Scotland, discourseswhich would have a profound effect on the spatial patterns and expecta-tions which would drive the domestic tourism industry for the next severaldecades.

Over a period of a few hundred years, looking at and moving throughnatural spaces became central features of what particular socio-economicgroups did while away from home on holiday. In fact, the emergence andvalorisation of nature appreciation as a performed set of first-hand expe-riences went hand in hand with the development of a range of techno-logical, economic and political changes which made increasing amounts ofleisure travel possible for a larger and larger percentage of the British pop-ulation. Individuals and groups chose to spend their often-precious timeoutside of work in natural landscapes because, in the words of John Urryand Jonas Larsen, they “anticipate[d]” those experiences would provide akind of pleasure or benefit that was unlike anything they could acquire intheir regular day to day lives.3 Those benefits, whether physical, psycho-logical, aesthetic or intellectual were constructed by a series of overlappingdiscourses which circulated through a number of texts and devices suchas topographical literature, guidebooks, photography, and by the turn ofthe twentieth century, cinema. Each of these representational technolo-gies contributed to “formalizing” particular “patterns of appreciation andmobility” extending the reach of the initial philosophical debates to themiddle and working classes.4 In Tourist Gaze 3.0, Urry and Larsen arguethat this combination of the “means of collective travel”, “the desire fortravel” and the rise of representational technologies set the foundation forthe emergence of the “tourist gaze” which became “a core component ofwestern modernity”.5

Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Film interrogates howone of these technologies, the moving image, not only reconstructed theScottish tourist map but renegotiated the already complex relationship

1 INTRODUCTION 3

Scottish communities had with looking at and moving through naturalspaces. The book uses one genre in particular, the scenic film, as a way oftracing the rise of domestic nature appreciation by the Scottish middle andworking classes. While the scenic genre remains largely underrepresentedin the field of early cinema, it is an unrivalled source of material detailingthe expansion of both regional travel and national tourism. Scottish scen-ics not only documented the manner in which different socio-economicgroups explored and reclaimed natural spaces but also played a centralrole in actual leisure performances, with the embodied gaze remaining acentral motif throughout the rise and fall of the genre. The scenic didnot solely display one single model of spectatorship, rather throughoutits lifespan it portrayed competing models while also juxtaposing com-plex and historically wide-reaching debates about the role natural spacesplay in defining personal and cultural identity structures. The early scenicwas in fact defined by its own precariousness and remains a potent culturalsymbol of the gaze’s contentious relationship to the dichotomies whichoften define leisure travel.

Framing the Gaze

How to look and move through a space lies at the heart of environmentalaesthetics. When appreciating and making judgements about any space orobject, a spectator draws on a particular framing mechanism to derive sig-nificance and meaning. These framing mechanisms construct the parame-ters of the view which typically involves the isolation of a series of elementsfrom the rest of the visual field and their union into “a consistent whole”.6

The frame becomes, as Michael Snow describes, an epistemological tool:“That’s to say that out of the universal field, knowledge isolates, selectsand points out unities or differences which were not previously evident.Identification, definition is a matter of limits, of recognition of limita-tions, bounds, boundaries”.7 For example, landscape painting depends ona frame in order to distinguish between the world of the painting and theworld of the observer, reinforcing what belongs in the view and what doesnot. Natural spaces often exceed the parameters of these rules or guides,they demand something from the spectator which is by its very naturesubversive, testing the foundations of aesthetic experience and knowledgeformation.

This resistance to being easily attained and controlled by a frameworklies at the forefront of contemporary environmental aesthetics. The field’s

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problematic nature has been defined by the role of immersion, especiallyat the time of its revival in the late 1960s. In “Contemporary Aestheticsand the Neglect of Natural Beauty”,8 published in 1966, R. W. Hepburnanalyses the differences between the form of embodied experience whichis central to environmental appreciation and the main aesthetic modelsof the day which attempted to construct a unified system for aestheticjudgements. He states that,

Some writers have been impressed by the fact that certain crucial featuresof aesthetic experience are quite unobtainable in nature – a landscape doesnot minutely control the spectator’s response to it as does a successfulwork of art; it is an unframed ordinary object, in contrast to the framed,“esoteric”, “illusory,” or “virtual” character of the art object. And so theartifact is taken as the aesthetic object par excellence, and the proper focusof study.9

In this account objects which can be appreciated aesthetically are neces-sarily framed and bounded. By contrast, a person experiencing a naturalspace remains within that space and is forced to integrate a large vari-ety of visual detail and sensation into the overall experience. Here thedetachment which is necessary in order to reach a state of contemplationis almost impossible to achieve if both it and immersion remain definedin their conventional manner. For Hepburn, one of the most importantaspects of these differences is the participatory nature of the latter. Thisparticipation allows for a reflexive internal free play where we engage in atransformative dialectic between performing the role of actor and specta-tor, allowing our creativity to be “challenged, set a task; and when thingsgo well with us, we experience a sudden expansion of imagination thatcan be remarkable in its own right”.10 Here the very thing which is val-ued about the frame, specifically its stability and determinateness, is chal-lenged by the accompanying possibilities provided by the unpredictableand interactional perceptual nature of environmental appreciation.

Space is a central example. Its potential as an object of aesthetic rel-evance is constantly being negotiated through its relationship to theembodied observer and its larger conceptual and cultural associations.Hepburn writes,

Space is neither a substance nor a quality of substances… To add to thecomplexity, we ourselves are spatial beings: the arm I stretch out to point

1 INTRODUCTION 5

to a star is itself a portion of space, the same space (even if subject todifferent gravitational influences). Unlike the situation with most aestheticobjects, we cannot get right outside space so as to focus on it.11

This interconnectedness makes it necessary to construct a theoreticalframework which can account for the excesses and nuances caught outsidethe bounds of the artistic frame,12 forcing a variety of epistemological andphenomenological issues to the surface. Are judgements possible when weare deeply implicated in the experiences and spaces that we are trying tomake sense of?

This debate about the place of environmental appreciation within aes-thetic philosophy signals a return to a set of questions which have theirroots at the very outset. While the field in analytic philosophy has onlybeen around for just over five decades, its antecedents date back to theeighteenth century, the same century which developed the initial concep-tual parameters of aesthetic philosophy and subjectivity.13 Nature and themanner of its appreciation was the primary object of concern for Britishphilosophers debating those parameters.14 First-hand experiences of natu-ral spaces, made possible by increased access to domestic and internationaltravel, constructed the possibility for new forms of pleasure that fell out-side the confines of the rules of taste dictating artwork at the time. Thesenew sensations and ancillary ideas brought the problem of cause and effectand subject and object to the fore, posing a series of new questions: Whatis the primary cause of these internal states? Are they elicited by natu-ral phenomena or the observer’s original disposition? Which internal fac-ulties should be relied upon to make judgements about them? Increas-ingly diverse forms of contact with natural spaces became fundamental toresponding to these issues, as well as establishing the bounds of taste and,eventually, if you were a member of the gentry, acquiring a well-roundedaesthetic education.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of new aes-thetic frameworks emerged in an attempt to make sense of these experi-ences and address these concerns. The most prominent and revolutionaryof these affective states became known as the sublime. The idea was firstintroduced into the British philosophical lexicon in the domain of rhetoricby Nicolas Boileau and his translation of Longinus, and then in relationto judgements of taste in reference to specific experiences of nature. Theconcept formalised and explained certain pleasurable experiences whichcould not be accounted for within the neoclassical system of beauty, a

6 S. WILSON

theory constructed out of a reasoned set of objective criteria.15 Movingaway from this model, theories of the sublime began by emphasising theproperties housed within natural objects, and then the interplay of inter-nal faculties.16 The concept was defined by a radical dichotomy of immer-sive and contemplative models of spectatorship. The sublime could not befound through traditional models of framing that demanded detachmentand distance alone; the experience was described as immediately dissi-pating when a subject was able to isolate and perceive a phenomenon’sboundaries.17 The sublime seemed in fact completely counter-intuitive toprevious view aesthetics, and yet this precariousness and instability onlyenhanced its cultural and conceptual value.

The sublime was not alone in trying to articulate and formalise par-ticular forms of contact with natural spaces. Other aesthetic frameworks,like the picturesque, began to emerge in critical and philosophical writ-ing, creating a complex terrain of competing prescriptive aesthetic models.But while each of these models may have centred around a different set ofexperiences and landscapes, they were all symptomatic of a palpable anxi-ety that existed at the core of much of the British discourse surroundingthe natural environment and its appreciation. This anxiety quickly spreadfrom the philosophical sphere to the popular one as access to travel beganto incorporate a wider and wider group of people.

The Rise of Leisure Travel

The cultural discourse surrounding nature appreciation rose in parallelto the philosophical one. Both were by-products of large sweeping tech-nological, economic and political changes occurring across Great Britainduring the same period which not only allowed, but eventually encour-aged middle, and then working class communities to not just travel but totravel for pleasure. In the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries GreatBritain faced a series of upheavals which directly altered the nature ofdomestic travel and the makeup of urban and rural landscapes, includ-ing the expansion of rail networks. While these changes were necessary toconstruct the material requirements for increased travel, the circulation ofplace-imagery encouraged a shift in perception with regard to the value ofsaid travel, making it more and more indispensable to the lifestyles of par-ticular social groups. By the mid-nineteenth century this proliferation ofvisual messaging was not only reorganising the physical environment butthe virtual one as well, transforming and reconstructing the way middleand working class people imagined that world. In Jean-Louis Comolli’s

1 INTRODUCTION 7

“Machines of the Visible” he describes a pattern in Europe that is equallyapplicable to Great Britain, “The second half of the 19th century lives in asort of frenzy of the visible. It is, of course, the effect of the social multi-plication of images: even wider distribution of illustrated papers, waves ofprints, caricatures, etc. The effect also, however, of something of a geo-graphical extension of the field of the visible and representable by jour-neys, explorations, colonisations, the whole world becomes visible at thesame that it becomes appropriatable”.18 For the first time in history theworld became accessible to larger and larger subsets of the population viastatic and then moving images. This “geographical extension” not onlymade virtual travel possible but transformed how first-hand experiencewas negotiated. The “inversion of priority of object over image”19 dra-matically changed the parameters of our relationship with not only nat-ural spaces but how those spaces solidified personal and national identitystructures.

Leisure travel, whether on Grand Tour to the Continent, or for aweek of sun and water in Rothesay, developed an ever-expanding indus-try, taking advantage of this shift in emphasis towards physical and virtualtravel. The industry promoted the importance of first-hand experienceas well as embedding those experiences in an ever more complex set ofcultural expectations and values. An array of texts and technologies par-ticipated in this expansion providing “physical” and “discursive” access tothe public.20 Most were produced to prepare or accompany a would-betraveller, including guidebooks, painted panoramas, magic lantern shows,photography and scenic filmmaking. Each object prescribed itineraries,viewpoints and models of spectatorship, providing the popular imagina-tion with the tools and frameworks they needed to feel like they hadthe required “cultural and material equipment to experience the coun-tryside”21 and participate in the wider popular discourse.

These texts largely existed as mediating devices between the naturalworld and spectator, constructing the semblance of a guarantee for thetourist that they too could experience the variety of pleasures and novel-ties that had been reserved for the likes of the gentry. Urry and Larsenargue that it was this “double helix” of photography and leisure travelwhich occurred around the mid 1800s which laid the foundation for the“tourist gaze”.22 Borrowing the concept of the gaze from Foucault, theydescribe several different “kinds of gaze authorised by various discourses”at work during the period, including those dictated by health, educationand heritage.23 They contend that each type of gaze was informed in

8 S. WILSON

part by the others and shared in an ideology about the central role ofthe subject in framing and articulating the meaning of structures avail-able around them, writing that “Gazing, is a performance that orders,shapes and classifies, rather than reflects the world”.24 These gazes wereable to “regulate” and “identify”, through the lens of each particular dis-course, “what is out-of- ordinary, what are relevant differences and whatis ‘other’”.25

The “scenic” gaze,26 as culturally defined through both nature appre-ciation and the burgeoning domestic industry, had a slightly more pre-carious role in articulating these defined boundaries. The concept nego-tiated the overlap between the contemplative, solitary “sociality” of theearlier “romantic gaze”,27 and the collective “spectatorial gaze”28 whichdefined mass tourism. But while the scenic gaze was built on what DeidreBoden and Harvey Molotch describe as the “compulsion to proximity”,29

a drive to encounter landscapes and views first-hand, the scenic tourist vis-ited these spaces in part because what they anticipated experiencing wasnot altogether defined by the variety of texts which recommended theselandscapes in the first place. While nature appreciation was, by the 1840s,firmly absorbed within the tourist itinerary, there still remained quite abit of debate about not only the best way to physically encounter thesespaces but also which experiences had the most value. I have referredto this exploratory form of spectatorship, constructed out of competingnarratives about the dichotomy of subject and object, elsewhere, as thetourist’s sublime.30 This lack of conceptual closure and cultural agree-ment helped the would-be tourist feel as if they were participating insomething much larger themselves, something that remained open to fur-ther personal inquiry.

While photography may have played a significant, if not singular, rolein entrenching the desire to travel into the modern psyche, film was themedium which was best disposed to translate the various discourses sur-rounding nature appreciation from one sphere to the other, embeddingnature appreciation into the very foundations of leisure travel. The mov-ing image was able to go further than the various representational textsand technologies which came before because it was able to replicate thecomplexities surrounding the embodied gaze while immersed in natu-ral spaces. It did not just circulate views and landscapes to the masses,it let them feel like they were taking part in the range of experiences.As Martin Lefebvre has argued in relation to narrative genres, film cannever become a vehicle of detached contemplation. Movement onscreen,

1 INTRODUCTION 9

formal features such as camera movement and editing patterns, and fea-tures which exceed the visual, necessarily temporalize space, creating arepresentation that is closer to everyday experience.31 This negotiationof the temporal and spatial construct images that resist being held andconsidered for long periods of time and, therefore, are constantly inter-twined with the potentiality of immersion and a sense of co-presence or“liveness”.32 The earliest genres to explore the medium’s potential withregard to displaying natural spaces juxtaposed a variety of different mod-els of spectatorship constructing often jarring and seemingly conflictingresponses in their audiences. Scenic filmmakers, whether professional oramateur, all took advantage of these possibilities, exploring the “mobi-lized gaze”33 and the manner in which the camera could help us betterframe familiar and foreign views. With an increase in the circulation ofthese single and multi-shot films across both regional and national bor-ders, communities began to see themselves and the spaces they movedthrough reflected back to them on screen in a “choreographing of land-scape encounters”,34 each of which had a direct impact on the meaningand value associated with each place.

Building a Scenic Nation

This proliferation of not only new models of spectatorship but also newpatterns of access had an acute effect on the formation of national andregional identities across the whole of Great Britain, but possibly none somuch as in Scotland where one landscape in particular defined the culturalnarrative for those both inside and outside of the country: the rugged,mountainous terrain of the Highlands. The country remained at the “pe-riphery” of Britishness, existing in a liminal space between familiar andother, representing both home and away for many would-be travellers.35

For this reason Scotland has had a complex history of both internal andtransborder tourism. That travel and its accompanying tourist markershave had a direct impact on the construction of local spatial identities,whether rural or urban, and redefined appropriate behaviour as well aspossible accessible spaces and routes.

While the popularity of transborder tourism was at its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, the first written accounts of travel to and around dif-ferent parts of the country date back to the late seventeenth century withMartin Martin (1695), followed slightly later by the likes of ThomasPennant (1769) and Samuel Johnson (1775).36 While these pieces oftopographical literature introduced English readers to the marvels of the

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Scottish landscape and marked the beginning of the period of tourism,it wasn’t until Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake and Waverley werepublished in the early nineteenth century that English tourists began toflock to different regions of the Highlands and Islands.37 With increasedrail links, tour guides and advertising campaigns, Scotland became a keydestination for the Victorian middle class traveller. And along with thissignificant increase in the number of tourists came the circulation of anunprecedented amount of landscape imagery depicting Scotland but pro-duced or funded elsewhere.

This pattern only increased with the invention of the kinematographand the advent of cinema, constructing an inequality between production,circulation and exhibition practices. While there were over 600 exhibi-tion sites located in Scotland by the mid-century, “with more cinemasand cinema seats per head of population north of the border than acrossBritain as a whole”, the vast majority of films presenting either Scottishlocations or narratives were produced by English or international compa-nies.38 This disparity between exhibition and production occurred in boththe domain of narrative fiction and actuality filmmaking and meant thatScottish audiences were more often than not viewing themselves and theirnative landscapes through imagery produced by others. By the 1910s sev-eral English, French and American companies featured Highland tours intheir catalogues.39 These scenics functioned as advertising vehicles sellingthe potential for exploration and contact with powerful experiences likethe sublime. In many ways they replicated the tropes circulated by theearlier guidebooks, where real landscapes were embedded in a “pastoralnostalgia”40 and became “portals into a past grown inaccessible to thecontemporary visitor”.41 The films were often displayed alongside localtopicals which, in contrast, rarely circulated outside of their own region.The two actuality genres constructed a contradictory narrative of Scottishidentity, both romantic and modern, idealised and real.

Charting the Tourist’s Landscape

This book interrogates the role these early scenic and travelogue filmsplayed in expanding the excursion map and disseminating specific travelnarratives and modes of spectatorship across various socio-economicgroups inside and outside of Scotland. It is particularly interested in therole the Scottish scenic played in negotiating not only how communitiesperceived their relationship to natural spaces but how the circulation and

1 INTRODUCTION 11

exhibition of those spaces formalised patterns of movement and access.The book is sensitive to the methodological aims of “new cinema his-tory” and the “spatial turn” in the humanities.42 As a spatial history ofthe scenic genre it involves a series of microhistorical studies that aim tounderstand the role of the genre within the “local norms of their commu-nities”.43 In a similar vein to John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths and Maria A.Vélez-Serna’s edited collection Early Cinema in Scotland (2018), Chart-ing Scottish Tourism does this by exploring cinema as a social experi-ence and embedding the formal aspects of these sponsored and amateurfilms inside their patterns of distribution and exhibition before comparingthem to the existing leisure and excursion models and their accompany-ing rhetoric. By interrogating the “history of representation” alongsidethe political, economic and social contexts which ushered in the emer-gence of cinema as a cultural institution,44 this book argues that in orderto understand the impact of the scenic within the context of regionalidentities, each of these aspects must be examined as interrelated.

Unlike other books dedicated to the history of Scottish tourism, thisbook’s primary focus is on the leisure experiences of Scottish communitiesas they participated in different facets of the growing industry while eitherat home or away. By examining the appreciation of nature which occurredon a local and regional scale, the work here marks a crucial departure fromUrry’s original definition of the tourist gaze. While I argue that theseparticular embodied performances in nature involve a form of “breakingwith established routines” which allows them to be compared and iso-lated from “the everyday and mundane”,45 this sense of anticipation, ofexploration, of engaging with the possibility of the “extraordinary”,46 didnot just occur when physically separated from one’s daily spatial patterns.The circulation of texts and technologies related to nature tourism hadthe potential to transform how communities looked at every landscape,whether on tour or during periods of leisure at home. It is the inter-play of at home and abroad which challenged the mechanisms at workin the scenic gaze and redefined how the relationship between identityand landscape became even further intertwined with the emergence andcirculation of the moving image.

Each chapter of this book takes on its own overlapping case study andbuilds on the work of different fields including environmental philosophy,literary criticism, cultural geography and early cinema studies. This inter-disciplinary approach makes it possible to address the manner in whichthe earliest narratives surrounding nature tourism transformed as they

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shifted between discursive spheres without neglecting the distinct histori-cal concerns of each period and group of people. Partially adopting AndréGaudreault’s historical methodology based on the “intermedial” natureof early film, the book approaches this segment of actuality filmmaking aspart of the larger cultural series associated with nature appreciation andtourism rather than the institutional form of cinema that occurred after.47

This intermediality will be analysed within the context of translocality,placing the dialectic of local situatedness and the mobile imagination atthe centre of social experiences of the rural and urban environment.48

The case studies isolate individual collections of films, production cat-alogues and guidebooks and trace the emergence of new forms of class-based nature tourism which are represented within them. The book paysparticular attention to the cultural debates surrounding representation,access and identity which winds through each collection. It relies on bothclose textual reading and discursive analysis, examining the extra-textualmaterial, exhibition settings and distribution networks surrounding thefilms and texts in order to determine how the industry perceived therole of these objects in relation to the larger tradition surrounding natureappreciation and tourism.

The first chapter maps the aesthetic and cultural narratives which werecentral to the surge of initial interest in domestic travel and Scottish land-scapes. It begins by examining the role of models like the sublime and thepicturesque in constructing the necessary conceptual foundations whichpaved the way for increased interest and travel to the country. In theinitial stages much of the narrative associated with that travel was dom-inated by members of the English upper classes who produced numer-ous pieces of travel writing extolling the aesthetic and epistemologicalvirtues of the natural landscapes found up north. Relying on detailed tex-tual analysis, the chapter interrogates the emergence of the walking tourthrough these philosophical texts and travel memoirs concentrating onthe underlying formal structures and concepts which were central to thevalorisation of the cultural practice. It uses Elizabeth Diggle’s Journal ofa Tour to the Highlands of Scotland (1788) and Dorothy Wordsworth’sRecollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803) as central case studies inthis regard, putting both texts in dialogue with classic works like WilliamWordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1810) and Thomas West’s A Guideto the Lakes (1778) which articulated the values of the genre during theperiod.

1 INTRODUCTION 13

Diggle and Dorothy Wordsworth were chosen because they not onlyexplored and extolled competing forms of travel behaviour but alsobecause they travelled and wrote under very different cultural conditions.The former toured the country only a few decades after Scotland hademerged as a potential travel destination while the latter travelled during apeak period of interest. These different material and discursive conditionshad a direct impact on the nature of the texts that both women produced.They provide the reader with insight into the process in which earlier con-ceptual debates about aesthetic appreciation were slowly embedded intothe cultural debates surrounding leisure travel by the upper and middleclasses. The chapter argues that when placed within this larger histori-cal context walking took on its own ideological role, addressing increas-ing anxiety towards industrialisation and the loss of traditional forms oflabour and relationships with rural landscapes. These themes and the sub-sequent performative traditions that they enabled would be taken up bylarger and larger groups of regional and cross-border middle class touristsin the century that followed.

Chapter 2 turns to the role of the moving image in expanding thetourism industry for the middle classes. The chapter is especially inter-ested in the manner in which these early, often sponsored, films repli-cated the patterns established by the guidebook genre and emphasised theimportance of collection and juxtaposition, whether of landscapes or com-munities. Collections and collecting behaviour have a profound impacton the manner in which communities and individuals conceptualise theirown spatial identities. By the turn of the twentieth century, various formsof representational technology were utilizing tropes associated with col-lecting to promote and sustain travel and tourism, including panoramas,magic lantern shows, photography and the moving picture. One of themost prolific companies in this regard was the Charles Urban TradingCompany which produced scenic and travel films across the globe for theBritish screen. Scotland became a key centrepiece for many of the compa-ny’s collections, providing a liminal space which existed on the peripheryof the nation. That space showcased Scotland as a series of contradictionswhereby the past and future were inextricably linked through the naturaland built landscape.

Rather than focus exclusively on the scenic films produced by Urban,this chapter traces the company’s continued interest in Scotland throughthe catalogues it circulated in its first decade of production, paying partic-ular attention to its 1906 Bonnie Scotland series. The catalogues provide

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us with an essential overview of the company’s output in order to helpnavigate the often-fragmented collection of scenics which remain withus today. The catalogues also document the impact different collectingmethodologies had on the manner in which Urban exploited the Scot-tish landscape for its audience. The chapter compares these descriptionsand patterns to the most popular travel routes and locations during theperiod. By mapping the two onto one another, we can see the powerand complexity of the narrative constructed by the company. The chapterargues that the Charles Urban Trading Company relied on an interplaybetween immersive and detached imagery in order to capture the rhetoricof home and away which made Scotland such a contradictory feature ofBritish colonialism. It is in fact “spatialized discourses” like these whichshifted purely “imaginary geographies”49 stocked in “nether-world mysti-cism and tartan bedecked Romanticism”50 into the “everyday action, ges-tures, crowd practice” and “regional identities”51 which are at the centreof this study.

Chapter 3 explores the longstanding tradition and importance of work-ing class nature tourism and the complex relationship it had to the filmindustry at the turn of the century. This chapter begins with a histori-cal overview of the role that rambling and access to natural spaces playedfor working class communities in Scotland before examining one partic-ular area and period when leisure travel by the urban working class wasmost popular, the annual Glasgow Fair. The chapter considers how theintegration of scenic films into the festivities challenged and championedtraditional excursion patterns maintained by the travel industry and localworking class tourists. It uses a number of archival sources associated withlocal and regional walking groups, including personal travel memoirs andpress material, alongside documents and film programmes circulated byvenues during the period, in order to map the rise of working class leisuretravel and the rapid inclusion of moving pictures into the holiday.

The chapter compares these travel patterns and exhibition contextswith two films which documented the festivities: the 1909 Glasgow andthe Clyde Coast, sponsored by the London and North Western Railwayand the 1921 Holiday Scenes at Rothesay , sponsored by the Palace PictureHouse in Rothesay. Both films constructed slightly different narrativesabout the role of travel and its relationship to the aesthetic appreciationof space and place. The intersection of working class travel and touristmarkers, like these films, makes the Glasgow Fair an important barometerfor judging the role of the traditional excursion map in shaping emerg-ing spatial patterns. These patterns reflected longstanding tensions over

1 INTRODUCTION 15

the relationship between land and property, and, the importance of freemovement and access in not only determining labour and leisure practicesbut also in reinventing the contested identities of these communities.

The last chapter shifts from the public to the private sphere and con-siders the importance of the rise of the amateur holiday film within thecontext of class, collection and nature appreciation during the interwarperiod. Amateur films are a rich and often untapped source of historicalevidence. They can reveal the degree to which individuals had internalisedthe tourist industry’s primary claims about the importance of regionaltravel in relation to cultural identity.

The chapter considers collections from two amateur filmmakers, DavidCharles Bowser and Frances H. Montgomery, and examines the impactthe larger scenic and travelogue industry had on the construction ofleisure activities and the importance of documenting one’s own spatialpatterns and identity. These collections were chosen because they bothinclude footage of regional holiday travel and leisure activities based athome. While they present competing aesthetic and thematic narrativesand diverging images of family life during the interwar period, both col-lections perform as important personal archives which are constantly re-evaluating the value of recording, collecting and organising experienceand appreciation. They become potent examples of the important placefamiliar and not so familiar landscapes played in negotiating personal andregional identities.

Chapters 3 and 4 are interested in the manner in which groups andindividuals began to push back at the boundaries established by thetourism industry, renegotiating not only where to go and how to moveand look once there but also the significance those experiences carriedwith them. In this sense the book shifts away from the tourist gaze towhat MacCannell calls the “second gaze”.52 While the tourist gaze relieson “institutions and practices of commercialised tourism” in order toforward a particular ideology based on “the notion of the transparencyof visual meaning”,53 the second gaze “is always aware that somethingis being concealed from it”.54 This second gaze pries open what Urryrefers to as the “hermeneutic circle” where the imagery circulated by theindustry is replicated again and again by the tourist in order to proveto themselves and their family that “they really have been there”,55 andreveals the “unexpected”56 buried beneath what is anticipated. MacCan-nell writes that “the second gaze turns back onto the gazing subject anethical responsibility for the construction of its own existence. It refuses

16 S. WILSON

to leave this construction to the corporation, the state, and the apparatusof touristic representation… It looks for openings and gaps in the culturalunconscious”.57 This attempt to re-engage with the apparatuses dictatingplace and gaze back at the manner of its execution articulates the “kernelof resistance”58 at the heart of both the rise of amateur filmmaking andworking class participation in the outdoors movement. These two groupsbegan to test their role in the larger industry by reversing the directionof the tourist gaze and breaking down the established binaries circulatedby the industry.

When reclaiming place both groups reconsidered the role natural land-scapes played in their daily and seasonal spatial patterns. While the tourismindustry attempted to apply restrictive framing mechanisms and view-points in order to insert the practice of appreciation into easily accessi-ble and commodifiable itineraries, these groups repeatedly returned toan exploratory mode of spectatorship which breached these manufac-tured confines and tropes. The push and pull between the overwhelm-ing abundance of place-imagery dedicated to Scotland and the communi-ties staking out their lives and identities directly inside highlights a deep-felt unease about the pace of modernisation on the spaces and patternswhich had previously defined regional and personal identity structures.While the precarious nature of the British discourse surrounding the nat-ural environment and its appreciation was largely symptomatic of thesechanges, the debates and associated rhetoric did provide individuals withthe language and performative patterns needed in order to re-engage withthe spaces surrounding them at home, spaces that had been previouslyoverlooked and taken for granted. These encounters contained subversiveends, challenging individuals to account for and reflect on the nature oftheir own gaze in places which by their very nature resisted being heldand consumed.

Notes1. Jean Adamson, From Blantyre to Barnacabber, an Edwardian Childhood in

the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland, ed. Alex Adamson (Linlithgow,2015), 64.

2. Adamson, 66.3. John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage Publica-

tions, 2011), 1. This book re-examines the theory Urry first described inThe Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London:Sage, 1990).

1 INTRODUCTION 17

4. Benjamin Colbert, “Introduction,” in Travel Writing and Tourism inBritain and Ireland, ed. Benjamin Colbert (New York: Palgrave Macmil-lan, 2012), 2.

5. Urry and Larsen, 14.6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge refers to this isolation and union when defin-

ing the manner in which the poet’s imagination constructs allegories,here quoted from Lecture III of 1818, in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criti-cism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, MA, 1936), 30. WilliamWordsworth would return to this definition in both his poetry and theGuide to the Lakes.

7. Michael Snow, “Michael Snow and Bruce Elder in Conversation, 1982,”in The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Uni-versity Press, 1994), 222.

8. This essay marks the resurgence of the field which had largely beenovertaken by the philosophy of art. See Noel Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics:Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001), 368 for anoverview of this shift.

9. R. W. Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natu-ral Beauty,” in British Analytical Philosophy, eds. B. Williams and A.Montefiore (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 287.

10. Hepburn, 291.11. R. Hepburn, “The Aesthetics of Sky and Space,” Environmental Values

19, no. 3 (2010): 277.12. See Arnold Berleant, “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature,” in Landscape,

Natural Beauty and the Arts, eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cam-bridge: Cambridge UP, 2013) and Samantha Wilson, “The Aesthetics ofImmersion and Detachment in the British Natural Sublime: A Histori-cal Perspective,” Environment, Space, Place 9, no. 1 (2017): 43–62 for acontemporary exploration of this problem in the field.

13. Andrew Ashfield and Peter De Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader inBritish Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1996), 1.

14. See Samantha Wilson, Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation inthe Sublime View: Nature Tours and Early Scenic Filmmaking in GreatBritain (PhD Thesis, Concordia University, 2016).

15. See Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime; a Study of Critical Theories inXVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1960) andBerleant (2013).

16. See Wilson, “The Aesthetics of Immersion and Detachment”.17. For example, in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of

the Sublime and Beautiful” Edmund Burke wrote that “hardly anythingcan strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of

18 S. WILSON

approach towards infinity; which nothing can do while we are able to per-ceive its bounds” in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-CenturyAesthetic Theory, eds. Andrew Ashfield and Peter De Bolla (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996), 136.

18. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” The Cinematic Apparatus,eds. Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan Press,1980), 122–123.

19. Nancy Armstrong, “Realism Before and After Photography: ‘The Fantas-tical Form of a Relation among Things,’” in A Concise Companion toRealism, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),105.

20. Hayden Lorimer, ‘Your Wee Bit Hill and Glen’: The Cultural Politics of theScottish Highlands, c. 1918–1945 (PhD Thesis, Loughborough University,1997), 94.

21. Lorimer, 94.22. Urry and Larsen, 165.23. Urry and Larsen, 19.24. Urry and Larsen, 2.25. Urry and Larsen, 14.26. Urry and Larsen, 6.27. Urry and Larsen, 19.28. Urry and Laresen, 20.29. Deidre Boden and Harvey Molotch, “The Compulsion to Proximity,” in

Now/Here: Time, Space and Modernity, ed. Roger Friedland and DeidreBoden (London, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 258, discussedin Urry and Larsen on 21.

30. Samantha Wilson, “Sublime Spectatorship: The Early British Scenic andthe Quest for the Perfect View,” in The Cinematic Sublime: Negative Plea-sures, Structuring Absences, ed. Nathan Carroll (Bristol: Intellect Press,forthcoming).

31. Martin Lefebvre, “On Landscape in Narrative Film,” Canadian Journalof Film Studies 20, no. 1 (2011): 74.

32. William Uricchio, “Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Non-FictionFilm,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. DaanHertogs and Nico De Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmu-seum, 1997), 130.

33. Heather Norris Nicholson, “At Home and Abroad with Cine Enthusi-asts: Regional Amateur Filmmaking and Visualizing the Mediterranean,ca. 1928–1962,” GeoJournal 59, no. 4 (2004): 324.

34. Norris Nicholson, 324 referring to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The RailwayJourney: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (Berkeley:University of California, 1986), 60.

1 INTRODUCTION 19

35. Kenneth McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands 1760–1860 (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007), 8.

36. Martin Martin and Donald Munro, A Description of the Western Islands ofScotland CA. 1695: A Voyage to St Kilda: A Description of the OccidentalI.E. Western Islands of Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2002), Thomas Pen-nant, A Tour in Scotland (London, 1772), Samuel Johnson, A Journey tothe Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Peter Levi (London: Penguin, 1984).

37. Alastair Durie, Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scotland,1780–1939 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003) 45–46, and McNeil, 51.

38. Trevor Griffiths, The Cinema and Cinema-Going in Scotland, 1896–1950(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012) 1. Glasgow led the way. By 1939 Glas-gow had “more cinema seats per capita than any other city in the world.”See John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths and Maria A. Vélez-Serna, “Introduc-tion,” in Early Cinema in Scotland, eds. John Caughie, Trevor Griffithsand Maria A. Vélez-Serna (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), 3.

39. John Caughie, “Depicting Scotland: Scotland in Early Films,” in EarlyCinema in Scotland, eds. John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths and Maria A.Vélez-Serna (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), 151–152.

40. Karyn Wilson, “The Land of Burns: Between Myth and Heritage,” in Lit-erary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Nicola Watson (NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 42.

41. Paul Smethurst, “Peripheral Vision, Landscape, and Nation-Building inThomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland, 1769–72,” in Travel Wiring andTourism in Britain and Ireland, ed. Benjamin Colbert(New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2012), 25.

42. Kate Bowles et al., Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches andCase Studies, eds. Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers(Oxford: Blackwell, 2011).

43. Richard Maltby, “New Cinema Histories,” in Explorations in New Cin-ema History: Approaches and Case Studies, eds. Richard Maltby, DanielBiltereyst and Philippe Meers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 20.

44. Caughie et al., “Introduction,” 2.45. Urry and Larsen, 3.46. Dean MacCannell, “Tourist Agency,” Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 25.47. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema,

trans. Tim Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2011).48. Clemens Greiner, Patrick Sakdapolrak, “Translocality: Concepts, Applica-

tions and Emerging Research Perspectives,” Geography Compass 7, no. 5(2013): 373–384.

49. Lorimer, 179.50. Lorimer, 176.51. Lorimer, 179.52. MacCannell, 30.

20 S. WILSON

53. MacCannell, 35.54. MacCannell, 36.55. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies

(London: Sage, 1990), 140.56. MacCannell, 33.57. MacCannell, 36.58. MacCannell, 31.

References

Adamson, Jean. 2015. From Blantyre to Barnacabber, an Edwardian Childhoodin the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland, ed. Alex Adamson. Linlithgow:unpublished memoir.

Armstrong, Nancy. 2010. Realism Before and After Photography: ‘The Fantasti-cal Form of a Relation among Things’. In A Concise Companion to Realism,ed. Matthew Beaumont, 102–120. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ashfield, Andrews, and Peter De Bolla. 1996. The Sublime: A Reader in BritishEighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Berleant, Arnold. 2013. The Aesthetics of Art and Nature. In Landscape, NaturalBeauty and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, 228–243. Cambridge:Cambridge UP.

Boden, Deidre, and Harvey Molotch. 1994. The Compulsion to Proximity.In Now/Here: Time, Space and Modernity, ed. Roger Friedland and DeidreBoden, 257–286. London, CA: University of California Press.

Burke, Edmund. 1996. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas ofthe Sublime and Beautiful. In The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Andrew Ashfield and Peter De Bolla, 131–143.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carroll, Noël. 2001. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cam-bridge UP.

Caughie, John, Trevor Griffiths, and Maria A. Vélez-Serna, eds. 2018. EarlyCinema in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

Colbert, Benjamin (ed.). 2012. Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ire-land. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1936. Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. ThomasMiddleton Raysor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Comolli, Jean-Louis. 1980. Machines of the Visible. In The Cinematic Apprara-tus, ed. Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath, 121–142. London: MacmillanPress.

Durie, Alastair. 2003. Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scotland,1780–1939. East Linton: Tuckwell.

1 INTRODUCTION 21

Gaudreault, André. 2011. Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cin-ema, trans. Tim Barnard. Urbana: University of Illinois.

Greiner, Clemens, and Patrick Sakdapolrak. 2013. Translocality: Concepts, Appli-cations and Emerging Research Perspectives. Geography Compass 7, no. 5:373–384.

Griffiths, Trevor. 2012. The Cinema and Cinema-Going in Scotland, 1896–1950.Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

Hepburn, Ronald W. 1966. Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of NaturalBeauty. In British Analytical Philosophy, ed. B. Williams and A. Montefiore,285–310. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

———. 2010. The Aesthetics of Sky and Space. Environmental Values 19, no.3: 265–271.

Johnson, Samuel. 1984. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. PeterLevi. London: Penguin.

Lefebvre, Martin. 2011. On Landscape in Narrative Film. Canadian Journal ofFilm Studies 20, no. 1: 61–78.

Lorimer, Hayden. 1997. ‘Your Wee Bit Hill and Glen’: The Cultural Politics ofthe Scottish Highlands, c. 1918–1945. PhD Thesis, Loughborough University.

MacCannell, Dean. 2001. Tourist Agency. Tourist Studies 1, no. 1: 23–37.Maltby, Richard, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers (eds.). 2011. Explorations

in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Oxford: Blackwell.Martin, Martin, and Donald Munro. 2002. A Description of the Western Islands

of Scotland CA. 1695: A Voyage to St Kilda: A Description of the OccidentalI.E. Western Islands of Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn.

McNeil, Kenneth. 2007. Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands 1760–1860. Columbus: Ohio State UP.

Monk, Samuel Holt. 1960. The Sublime; a Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

Norris Nicholson, Heather. 2004. At Home and Abroad with Cine Enthusiasts:Regional Amateur Filmmaking and Visualizing the Mediterranean, ca. 1928–1962. GeoJournal 59, no. 4: 325–333.

Pennant, Thomas. 1772. A Tour in Scotland. London.Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and

Perception of Time and Space. Berkeley: University of California Press.Smethurst, Paul. 2012. Peripheral Vision, Landscape, and Nation-Building in

Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland, 1769–72. In Travel Writing andTourism in Britain and Ireland, ed. Benjamin Colbert, 15–30. New York:Palgrave Macmillan.

Snow, Michael. 1994. Michael Snow and Bruce Elder in Conversation, 1982. InThe Collected Writings of Michael Snow, 221–231. Waterloo: Wilfrid LaurierUP.

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Uricchio, William. 1997. Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Non-FictionFilm. In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, ed. Daan Her-togs and Nico De Klerk, 119–131. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Film-museum.

Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies.London: Sage.

Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage.Wilson, Karyn. 2008. The Land of Burns: Between Myth and Heritage. In Lit-

erary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Nicola Watson, 37–49.New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wilson, Samantha. 2016. Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation in theSublime View: Nature Tours and Early Scenic Filmmaking in Great Britain.PhD Thesis: Concordia University.

———. 2017. The Aesthetics of Immersion and Detachment in the British Nat-ural Sublime: A Historical Perspective. Environment, Space, Place 9, no. 1:43–62.

———. Forthcoming. Sublime Spectatorship: The Early British Scenic and theQuest for the Perfect View. In The Cinematic Sublime: Negative Pleasures,Structuring Absences, ed. Nathan Carroll. Bristol: Intellect Press.

CHAPTER 2

Home and Away: The Rise of theWalkingTour and Guidebook

Abstract This chapter traces the emergence of domestic nature appre-ciation and tourism in Scotland. In the initial stages much of the narra-tive associated with that travel was dominated by members of the Englishupper classes who produced numerous pieces of travel writing extollingthe aesthetic and epistemological virtues found up north. The chapterinterrogates the emergence of these walking tours through two case stud-ies: Elizabeth Diggle’s Journal of a Tour to the Highlands of Scotland(1788), and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a tour made in Scot-land (1803), concentrating on the underlying formal structures and con-cepts which were central to the valorization of the cultural practice. Itargues that when placed within this larger historical context walking tookon its own ideological role, addressing increasing anxiety towards indus-trialization and the loss of traditional forms of labour and relationshipswith rural landscapes.

Keywords Walking · Nature appreciation · The sublime · Guidebooks ·Dorothy Wordsworth · Scotland · Elizabeth Diggle

The proliferation of travel writing and the emergence of the popularguidebook had a profound impact on the values and expectations ofwould-be British tourists at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thesetexts paved the way for transborder tourism by circulating and translatinga number of competing aesthetic and epistemological narratives between

© The Author(s) 2020S. Wilson, Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Film,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39153-9_2

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24 S. WILSON

the philosophical and popular spheres. Each of these narratives proposedits own model of spectatorship which allowed an individual or group toparticipate in a particular style of address. These, in turn, were embeddedwithin their own overarching methodologies about our relationship withthe natural world.

This chapter begins by tracing the larger cultural and socio-economicchanges which needed to occur before Scotland could become a poten-tial destination and subject for the travel writer. The construction ofappropriate language and conceptual frameworks was necessary beforeEnglish critics could understand, and eventually anticipate, the pleasuresthat awaited them in the landscapes up north. Travel to the Continent, inpart, opened the way for that possibility. Alongside significant changes intheology and the sciences, increased travel provided the breeding groundfor new aesthetic experiences with landscapes that were once ignored,feared or detested. These experiences would in turn lead to the pro-posal of several aesthetic models, like the sublime and picturesque, whichattempted to provide explanatory weight to these new, often overwhelm-ing and disconcerting, pleasures. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-turies, the topographical literature which espoused each of these mod-els would slowly transform into a succession of guidebooks leading theEnglish tourist further and further up north.

The second half of the chapter looks at two texts written by womenwhile participating in these home tours: Elizabeth Diggle’s Journal of aTour to the Highlands of Scotland (1788) and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rec-ollections of a tour made in Scotland (1803), and examines both sets ofmotivations and models of spectatorship within the context of the largerdiscourse surrounding aesthetic appreciation and the walking tour. Therehas been much debate in the field of literary criticism exploring the poten-tial differences between the work of female and male travel writers dur-ing the period, with recent scholarship turning away from hard and fastessential categories to instead focus on gender as only one factor whichinfluenced each author’s process.1 While I would agree that the heteroge-nous nature of output produced by women writers during the period wasrelated to a number of socio-economic constraints, gender did have asignificant impact on the spaces and opportunity for conversation whichwomen had access to during their tours.2 These texts provide insights intothe nature of contact within these spaces and the subtle overlap betweenthe private and public spheres in which travel experiences were locatedduring the period.

2 HOME AND AWAY: THE RISE OF THE WALKING TOUR … 25

Diggle and Wordsworth’s writing also provide interesting examples oftwo different travel genres which straddled the public and private publish-ing arenas as well. Both works discussed in this chapter were left unpub-lished in their lifetime (though both show signs of circulation) and there-fore explore the personal nature and interrelated processes of both traveland writing for these authors. As Zoë Kinsley argues, manuscript writ-ing has long been overlooked in literary circles even though these textsrepresent significant sources of evidence about how aesthetic models andrhetoric were circulating and transforming actual travel patterns at thetime.3 This statement is particularly relevant in Diggle’s case, who regu-larly receives only sporadic mention in contemporary scholarship.

While written only a few decades apart, each woman’s reflections high-light subtle differences of process and methodology do in part to thesignificant changes to the tourism infrastructure which occurred over theturn of the nineteenth century. Both texts provide detailed evidence aboutthe effect of these conceptual, cultural and material shifts on the man-ner in which English tourists envisioned not only how to look and movethrough the landscapes they encountered but also the impact these pointsof contact would have on the tourists themselves as they travelled backhome. This dialectic of home and away would become a central motif fortexts and representational technology trying to come to terms with therole of domestic travel on regional identity structures. It remains symp-tomatic of an underlying anxiety about the role of natural and built land-scapes on identity formation during the period.

Learning to Understand the Sublime

A fundamental paradigm shift was necessary before interest in Scottishlandscapes could really begin to take root in the British imagination. Priorto this, the features which made up the typical mountainous Highlandlandscape remained very challenging to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century eye and fell well outside of the traditional neoclassical definitionsof beauty and taste held by the period. Evidence of this discomfort can befound in numerous accounts by aristocrats travelling to the Continent inthe early 1600s. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson describes, three of the mostwell-known travellers and writers of the period, Thomas Coryat, JamesHowell and John Evelyn, all confessed to being afraid as they passedover mountain ranges. In just one example Howell described the Alpsas “high and hideous” and, while comparing them to Welsh mountains,

26 S. WILSON

wrote “they are but pigmies compared to giants, but blisters comparedto imposthumes, or pimples to warts”.4 Mountains were imperfections tothese travellers, confusing distortions on an otherwise well proportionedand pleasing piece of countryside. The Alps, and mountains in general,could not be subsumed under the rules that had dominated classical idealsof taste. Beauty was “a mean between extremes, appealing to Reason thatrecognised proportion, limitation, and restraint as qualities imposed byGod upon Nature when he brought order out of chaos”.5 This conven-tional definition posed important theological and scientific barriers as wellas paradoxes for the appreciation of anything irregular, vast and indefinite.

Along with numerous other changes in the realm of cosmology, geol-ogy and theology which began to provide a rationale for the existence ofthese landscapes,6 the Grand Tour would construct the necessary breed-ing ground for new and uncomfortable sensations and emotions. AsChristopher Hussey writes, “the awakening of England to an appreciationof landscape was a direct result of the Grand Tour becoming fashionablewith the aristocracy after the isolation of the country from the rest ofEurope, during the greater part of the seventeenth century”.7 He goeson to say that direct contact with the mountains in the Alps “was a testof how far the relish of grand landscape had overcome the natural distasteof danger and discomfort”.8

Travelling through the Alps created a religious and aesthetic crisis forThomas Burnet, author of one of the most popular texts of the seven-teenth century, A Sacred Theory of the Earth.9 But rather than eitherignoring or fearfully suppressing the experience, as was common before,Burnet openly discussed the overwhelming sensations brought on by theviews he took in. Burnet spent three years away from England and whenhe returned wrote the following: “And there appearing nothing of Order,or any regular Design in its Parts, it seems reasonable to believe that itwas not the Work of Nature, according to her first Intention, or accordingto the first Model that was drawn in Measure and Proportion by the Lineand by the Plummet, but a secondary Work, and the best that could bemade of broken Materials”.10 While he could not reduce his experience tothe definition of beauty that he espoused, he would repeatedly return todescribing the mountains which he condemned: “Places that are strangeand solemn strike an Awe into us, and incline us to a kind of superstitiousTimidity and Veneration”.11 Along with awe, he adds another importantmotif that would be repeatedly emphasised in the next century: “what-soever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of INFINITE, as all Things

2 HOME AND AWAY: THE RISE OF THE WALKING TOUR … 27

have that are too big for our Comprehension, they fill and over-bear theMind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of Stupor andAdmiration”.12 His imagination was continuously being stirred and thatleft him uneasy.

Four years after the English publication of the Sacred Theory of theEarth, John Dennis took the same journey across the Alps and wrote oneof the most prescient descriptions of those mountains published to date:

The sense of this produc’d different motions in me, viz, a delightful Hor-rour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, Itrembled… I am delighted, ‘tis true at the prospect of Hills and Valleys, offlowry Meads, and murmuring Streams, yet it is a delight that is consistentwith Reason, a delight that creates or improves Meditation. But transport-ing Pleasures follow’d the sight of the Alpes, and what unusual transportsthink you were those, that were mingled with horrours, and sometimesalmost with despair? But if these Mountains were not a Creation, but for-m’d by universal Destruction… than are these Ruines of the old World thegreatest Wonders of the New.13

Prior to this, beauty was governed by very specific rules which could beaccessed, understood and appreciated because of their very basis withinthe faculty of Reason. Once the universality of these conventions beganto be repudiated by the acknowledgement of pleasure which contradictedthe original parameters, a demand for a new framework was created. Thatframework would eventually be associated with the natural sublime.

The natural sublime would have a defining role in attracting a rangeof people northwards. In the British tradition the concept was defined bytwo interrelated debates: What is the nature of sublime pleasure? And howdo I experience it? Both debates were deeply rooted in understanding therelationship between cause and effect and subject and object, especiallyin relation to the experience of natural spaces. Thomas Weiskel describesthe eighteenth-century sublime as a process of three stages. In the firstthe observer begins in a state of equilibrium where their relation to theobject is easily determined and constructed out of habit. In the secondphase normal perception breaks down. He writes that in this phase thesubject immediately senses “a disconcerting disproportion between innerand outer. Either mind or object is suddenly in excess- and then both are,since their relation has become radically indeterminate”.14 The last phaseis a reaction to the astonishment and confusion of the second. Here the

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subject attempts to recover a balance or equilibrium between her internalstates and outer world.

The position of the spectator had a fundamental effect on the require-ments of the first two phases. Edmund Burke provided one of the mostpopular descriptions of this form of spectator address writing,

In all these cases, if the pain and terror are so modified as not to beactually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is notconversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotionsclear the parts, whether fine, or gross, of a dangerous and troublesomepleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged withterror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest ofall the passions. Its object is the sublime.15

A balance between proximity and distance dictated the possibility of thesublime experience because it offered the spectator both an immedi-ate embodied response and contemplative space. These two experientialmodes are key to the “astonishment” which dictated both the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century sublime.16 The object which affects the mindmust be close enough to be singled out from the rest of the landscapeand create a single and uniform impression on the mind but not so closeto actually agitate and register as fear. So, while there may be many posi-tions which can induce an experience of beauty, there are really only afew variables which can create the immediacy necessary to experience thepurely or primarily sublime.

The precariousness defined by the sublime experience made the aes-thetic model incredibly sought after by the British gentry and wouldspawn its own cultural industry promoting domestic and internationalleisure travel. This quest for the perfect sublime experience was in manyways a break from previous conventions associated with the Grand Tour.While the latter was defined by collecting particular views or experienceswhich were essential to developing a culturally cohesive education in taste,experiencing the sublime involved far more loftier goals and quite a bit ofexperimentation. This form of travel was very much embedded in theprocess where the spectator risked returning home having completelychanged how they saw themselves, their environment and their larger pur-pose. The sublime was defined as reaching past the edges of reason andexpanding one’s own imagination to the point of touching the infinite,17

and the only way to really experience this form of transcendence duringthe period was on foot.

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The Rise of the Walking Tour

The value of walking surfaced in parallel to the rise of sublimity and natureappreciation among the middle and upper classes in Britain. Prior to themid-eighteenth century the idea of travel was associated with hardshiprather than pleasure and education, walking in particular was attachedto a specific socio-economic group and related closely to work ratherthan leisure. Those who could not afford horses or animal-drawn vehicleswalked, those who had no fixed community or place of shelter walked:vagrants, labourers and criminals.18 Because of the risk and physical exer-tion needed to complete a journey of any distance, whether on horse, incarriage, or on foot, travel was defined by the importance of the desti-nation rather than the process itself. Literary historian Anne Wallace usesthe term “true travel” and describes this form of travel as “undertakenby a very limited class of people to a prescribed… set of places… thisdestination-oriented travel, ideally excludes the process of travel the travailof moving from place to place, and its advocates and practitioners seek tomake that process as nearly transparent and unnoticeable as possible”.19

Two historical factors greatly transformed the role of travel and theproperties associated with walking in particular: the revolution in mech-anised transport and enclosure reforms. Between the mid-eighteenth andearly nineteenth century a variety of new forms of travel were introducedand standardised across Britain, including forms of mass transport likecoaches and trains. By the mid-1830s almost ten million coach journeyswere being made per year, a number to be rivalled only by train jour-neys which would reach almost thirty million a decade later, and increaseexponentially by the late nineteenth century.20 For Wallace this shiftedperception of walking in two ways: “First, it altered the socio-economiccontent of walking by making fast, cheap travel available to the labouringclasses, thus increasing the attractiveness of travel in general and remov-ing walking’s long-standing implication of necessity and so of poverty andvagrancy”.21 Secondly, new modes of transport drastically transformedand diversified the “perceptual framework” available to passengers whileactually travelling, placing a new emphasis on the process over the destina-tion.22 Both shifts re-emphasised the role of leisure and the importanceof choice in travel gesturing towards the expansion of domestic naturetourism and the eventual introduction of walking tours.

Enclosure laws had a slightly more complex and paradoxical role inreconceptualising walking as a leisure activity. Between 1604 and 1916

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huge sections of England were targeted by enclosure bills, transformingtraditional boundaries, pushing agricultural labourers out of rural areasand into the towns for work. As members of the working class movedinto urban areas, members of the middle class were using their increasingamount of leisure time to get out.23

The late seventeenth century ushered in the rise of the home tour andthe establishment of “Britain’s touristic infrastructure”.24 Over the nexthundred years “the shape of modern tourism was being laid out”.25 Atthe turn of the eighteenth century, traveller Celia Fiennes argued unequiv-ocally for the importance of domestic travel as a “cure” for the “over-valuing” of foreign travel and a return to patriotic appreciation.26 AsKinsey argues, the home tour was able to “affirm one’s feeling of nationalidentity” when travelling across England, while also “unfasten[ing] one’srelationship to it”27 when passing across the borders to Scotland andWales. Much of the rhetoric associated with nationhood and identity wascirculated in tandem with corresponding models of aesthetic appreciationwithin the increasing amount of travel literature and guidebooks pub-lished from the mid-eighteenth century on.

While these domestic guides quickly expanded to celebrate landscapesfurther and further north in England and across the border, the first batchof guidebooks remained offshoots of the writing done while on a GrandTour, emulating the quest for perfect views (defined by the style and fram-ing of the landscape painting) rather than discussing the role or mode ofthe journey. The Scottish born Thomas West would be responsible forfirst articulating this particular style of picturesque guidebook and popu-larising the English Lake District in his A Guide to the Lakes publishedin 1778. West constructed his aesthetic tours through the use of “sta-tions” which were usually naturally built points in which a tourist couldbest take in the view. He directed his reader to a series of these aroundeach of the major lakes in the district. Many of these points of view wereelevated, allowing the observer access to a series of complete picturesquescenes that could be contemplated. He introduces his guide as an educa-tional document, advertising the district as an essential part of aestheticand moral cultivation, especially for those who have lived their lives in thecities.

West describes each station with an incredible amount of detail, fromthe overall layout of the scene from right to left, to the layers constructedin depth from foreground to background, pausing every once in a whileto situate features of the view in the larger geographical area. The first

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station at Lake Windermere is broken down over a series of pages, manyof which he dedicates to the series of mountains visible from the elevatedpoint. In one instance he writes of a mountain as “retiring inward, makes asemicircular bay, surrounded with a few acres of the most elegant verdure,flopping upward from the water’s edge, graced with a cottage, in thefinest point of view. Above it, the mountain rises in an agreeable wildness,variegated with featered trees, and silver-grey rocks”.28 While visiting eachstation he also recommends that the tourist carry a telescope in orderto view “the fronts and summits of inaccessible rocks, and the distantcountry, from the tops of the high mountains”.29 This meant that whilehe prescribed points of elevation and overviews to the observer, he wasalso interested in pointing out specific topographical details, that is as longas the tourist preserved their position of detachment from the scene itself.

This emphasis on detachment, elevation and distance was at the heartof the picturesque, whose quintessential traveller pursued their object likea hunter, never completely satisfied until each possible scene had beentracked down. This conceptualisation of leisure travel followed from thework of William Gilpin who constructed one of the first formulations ofthe picturesque. Gilpin described the picturesque tourist with the follow-ing: “shall we suppose it greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue atrivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties ofnature? To follow her through all her recesses? To obtain a sudden glance,as she flits past him in some airy shape? To trace her through the mazesof the cover? To wind after her along the vale? Or along the reachesof the river”. He continues, writing, “After the pursuit we are gratifiedwith the attainment of the object. Our amusement, on this head, arisesfrom the employment of the mind in examining the beautiful scenes wehave found”.30 The picturesque traveller always remains detached fromthe scene, separating themselves from their prey. Even while faithfully fol-lowing West’s precise directions, they imagine themselves on an adven-ture, the first to explore the area where “the mind is kept constantly inan agreeable suspense”.31

This style of guidebook eventually came into competition with a verydifferent one which was far more interested in the quest to experience thenatural sublime rather than capture the picturesque. Considering the roleof the former in the Romantic tradition it is not surprising that WilliamWordsworth was the writer to produce one of the first of these guides.Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes marks a shift towards travel which wasvalued for its own sake as a means of developing the imagination. While

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both styles of guide prescribed similar points of view, especially those posi-tions which allowed for a certain amount of elevation, they diverged inepistemological methodology and audience.

Wordsworth’s Guide to the LakesFor his own part, Wordsworth had a lot of experience with these ear-lier picturesque texts. He read West in grammar school and took oneof Gilpin’s guides on his tour of the Wye. The latter eventually becamethe inspiration for Tintern Abbey.32 But an older Wordsworth wouldhave a very different attitude towards the gaining popularity of domes-tic tourism. In “The Brothers” included in the 1800 edition of LyricalBallads, he writes

These Tourists, Heaven preserve us! needs must liveA profitable life: some glance along,Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,And they were butterflies to wheel aboutLong as the summer lasted: some, as wise,Perched on the forehead of a jutting crag,Pencil in hand and book upon the knee,Will look and scribble, scribble on and look,Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,Or reap an acre of his neighbour’s corn…33

Here are the telltale signs of the picturesque traveller, constantly movingfrom scene to scene, sketchpad in hand, more concerned for the imme-diate visual pleasures than those cultivated in the imagination. But evenwith this disdain for the casual middle class tourist, a decade after, in needof ways to improve his finances, Wordsworth attempted his own guide.34

Published in five editions from 1810 to 1835, Wordsworth’s Guide tothe Lakes was written using both poetry and prose (the poetry being bothembedded in the main topographical text and in a series of passages fromother writers inserted on their own). Wordsworth’s guide did includea short section with directions on suitable walks, the distances betweenplaces of interest and the best natural or built stations in order to beable to access and admire specific views. But, unlike the traditional guideswhich were purely and exhaustively descriptive, Wordsworth’s guide waswritten from the point of view of a long-time inhabitant. It reflected the

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goals he had set for his poetry which each aimed “to direct the atten-tion to some moral sentiment, or to some general effectiveness, or lawof thought, or of our intellectual constitution”.35 The guide not onlyfunctioned as a perfect corollary to the previous debates surrounding thenatural sublime, providing practical steps in which to achieve the perfectbalance of proximity and distance but was also written as a template forfuture tour guides. In a letter to Lady Beaumont written in 1810, heexclaims, “what I wished to accomplish was to give a model of the man-ner in which topographical descriptions ought to be executed, in orderto their being either useful or intelligible, by evolving truly and distinctlyone appearance from another. In this I think I have not wholly failed”.36

As Ernest De Selincourt suggests in his introduction to the 1835 edition,most of the previous guides were written by men who experienced thelandscape for the first time on tour; “…in spite of all their enthusiasm,[they] remain outside their subject”.37 While describing the stylistic dif-ferences between Wordsworth and the most popular topographical writersof his day, he states of the latter, that

To call them tourists, bent upon recording a holiday experience, andattracted to the country by reason of its novelty, is a hard saying, butincontrovertible. What wonder that they could not capture the secret ofnature’s beauty and significance, and remained untouched by those subtlerinfluences which are the silent reward of a life dedicated to her love?38

Unlike these men, Wordsworth, an inhabitant of the area, had beensteeped in that love and would use that experience (along with his poeticeye) to educate his reader.

The Guide to the Lakes foregrounded the relationship of the observerto the natural world with the direct aim of cultivating his or her mind.Sublimity is necessarily refined and complicated by being contrasted withqualities normally associated with beauty and the picturesque. This jux-taposition of proportion, irregularity and grandeur is a by-product ofWordsworth’s larger emphasis on moving through spaces and places,rather than locating the perfect stations in order to survey them from astationary position. Within the various walking tours that he described,Wordsworth intertwined elevated vantage points which allowed accessto “perfect pictures”39 and the small topographical details that appearedalong the way, asking his reader to experience the space at different levelsof height and proximity.

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Wordsworth introduces the area through an imaginary point of sur-vey, located between the mountains of “Great Gavel” and “Scawfell”,perched on top of a cloud “not more than half a mile’s distance fromthe summit of each”.40 From this “station” he is able to situate each ofhis walking excursions geographically. While this elevated point becomesa necessary topographic tool for the rest of the sections dedicated to thetraveller, he also uses the device as an aesthetic tool, often turning topoetry to describe the view. But, unlike previous guides, these elevatedand bird’s-eye views are nowhere near as frequent. They occur alongsidedetails related to the walk itself, ways of enjoying moving through the dis-trict, and little-known spots to find yourself in along the way. He recom-mends that Windermere should be experienced “from both its shores andits surface” following streams and rivers out into small fields and ascend-ing and descending into coves.41 Further along in the guide he expandsthis statement to include the area as a whole; “It is a great advantage toa traveller or resident, that these numerous lanes and paths, if he be azealous admirer of Nature, will lead him on into all the recesses of thecountry, so that the hidden treasures of its landscapes may, by an ever-ready guide, be laid open to his eyes”.42 Whether Wordsworth is pointingtowards large vistas or small spaces, it is their relationship to the wholewhich is valued rather the mere act of gazing upon them. The main roleof the cultivated traveller seems to be to understand “their bearings andrelations to each other”.43

These “relations” are dependent on the traveller’s power of observa-tion, previous knowledge and how they move through the space. In fact,it seems for Wordsworth that how to look is more important to complexaesthetic appreciation than where to look. The most overt expression ofthis process is highlighted in his description of the proper order in whichto experience certain mountain settings so as to properly appreciate theirsublimity and beauty:

As to the order in which objects are best seen – a lake being composed ofwater flowing from higher grounds, and expanding itself till its receptacleis filled to the brim, – it follows, that from its outlet, especially if the lakebe in a mountainous country; for, by this way of approach, the travelerfaces the grander features of the scene, and is gradually conducted into itsmost sublime recesses.44

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Aesthetic experience is not so much a matter of finding appropriate phe-nomena but the result of the interaction between inner and outer worldconstructed out of embodied engagement. The complexity of that affec-tive response greatly depends on a preconditioned mind which is in part aproduct of specific movements through space. Without any one of thesecriteria a spectator either misses certain aspects of the experience or dwellson individual components of the visual scene without being able to shiftinto the conceptual realm and consider the experience as a unified whole.

Walking underpins this mode of spectatorship. As Wallace argues,Wordsworth’s writing presented the most elaborate defence and recon-ceptualisation of the practice to date. Walking played a fundamental rolein Wordsworth’s conception of poetic labour. It allowed the author toreconnect to the pre-enclosure landscape by filling the role of the farmerand cultivator with that of the “localizing yet traveling action of walk-ing”.45 The mode of travel was singled out from the other mechanisedoptions as a form of cultivation that allowed someone to be “both placedand moving, stable and changing” inside their local landscape.46

Scotland on Tour

While these two prototypical guides were dedicated to the Lake Dis-trict, their aesthetic and ideological motivations underpin the range oftopographical literature being published about Scotland during the sameperiod. With the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746 and turmoil on theContinent, Scotland became increasingly of interest to the English upperand, eventually, middle class traveller. Prior to the mid-eighteenth centuryforeigners rarely made the journey north. As a direct result of increasedmilitary presence after Culloden came road construction and regionalmapping. These slowly made the country more accessible and enhancedits reputation as both a “respectable and safe destination”.47 Alongsidethese physical and geographical changes, regions in the north of Scot-land became increasingly mythologised by those living across the bor-der and in the southern regions of the country. Before the mid-centuryeven travel between the Lowlands and the Highlands was infrequent withSamuel Johnston stating in 1773 that “to the southern inhabitants ofScotland, the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknownwith that of Borneo or Sumatra”.48 It was, as historian Charles Withersargues, a combination of “the geographical ‘discovery’ of the region; theidea of the Highlander as ‘noble savage’ in the context of enlightenment

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theories on the stages of societal development; and a Romantic interestin the primitive virtue alongside interests in the aesthetic pleasures to begained in contemplation of picturesque”49 and sublime scenery whichconstructed the conceptualisation of, and ushered in travel to, the Scot-tish Highlands. The last two themes began in part with the publication ofJames MacPherson’s translations of Ossian which “reinforced the imageof the Highlands as both the desolate refuge of a primitive people andan example, par excellence, of a sublime landscape”.50 By the turn of thenineteenth century these ideas were cemented into the cultural imagina-tion by Sir Walter Scott’s novels.

While individual motivations behind tourism in Scotland during theperiod were quite diverse, they rarely deviated too far outside those ini-tial ideas and expectations. As we have seen with regard to competingguidebooks, many were motivated by the cultural and aesthetic aspirationsassociated with the Grand and sublime tour, while others also wished to“experience primitive societies whose language and culture were alreadyfelt to be disappearing fast”.51 Many balanced this motivation with oneof national pride believing that they were in fact helping to unite thetwo countries and participate in a “civilizing process”.52 Travellers wereprovided with direction from a number of pieces of writing which eachbuilt on one or more aspects of these original motivations. Martin Mar-tin wrote a guide to the Western Islands in 1695 followed by ThomasPennant (1769), Samuel Johnson (1775) and James Boswell (1785). Thenumber of published guides continued to increase throughout the endof the century, jumping from seven in the 1760s to fifty-three in the1810s.53 Estimates of both published and unpublished tours are vastlyhigher with A. Mitchell referring to a hundred and eight within the periodbetween 1750 and 1800.54

At the outset of the period travellers relied heavily on local guides55

with topographical writing and, later, guidebooks, taking on a more pre-dominant role as time wore on and infrastructure improved. During theperiod travellers from England followed two distinct tours depending onwhether they were exploring the west or east coast of the country. Thoseinterested in the former travelled up to Glasgow through the Falls ofClyde then on to Loch Lomond and over to Perthshire. When takingthe east coast tour, travellers came through Roslin Chapel to Edinburghand then ventured off to Stirling to visit Banockburn.56 Both ElizabethDiggle and Dorothy and William Wordsworth (accompanied by SamuelColeridge for part of the journey) travelled variations of these routes in

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the late eighteenth century.57 Diggle and Wordsworth serve as an inter-esting comparison of competing motivations and travelling behaviour.Both women described their experiences in very detailed letters and diaryentries written for their families and friends. Diggle and her aunt trav-elled across England to Scotland for a three-month tour in 1788 and theWordsworths did a similar tour in 1803. Both parties stayed in a mixtureof private homes and inns, and experienced significant setbacks and hard-ships attempting to navigate uneven terrain both on foot and via carriage,as well as finding available lodgings along the way.

Diggle’s letters were written in a particularly interesting period forwomen travel authors. While Diggle was certainly not the first woman totravel across Scotland on a home tour (in 1772 the Scots Magazine hadalready remarked on how fashionable the country had become for Englishtourists58), her writing functions as quite an early example. Based on Eliz-abeth Hagglund’s survey of diaries of domestic travel held by the CountyRecord Offices of England and Wales, only ten were written between1750 and 1775 and twenty prior to the end of the century. In a surveyof other British Archives which examined the number of women’s traveldiaries held, there were only two before 1775 (both written by Scottishwomen traveling within the country) and eight before 1800.59 Diggle’stour fell right in the middle of this period, just a few years after JamesBoswell’s famous account. This meant that much of Diggle’s understand-ing of the country was underpinned by a few pieces of travel writing thathad already been published and a larger tradition of guides written abouthome tours in England rather than Scotland. Any other anecdotal infor-mation would have been circulating among her sphere of acquaintancesin London.

Diggle’s manuscript involved two parts. The first was a collection ofletters and the second was a meticulous list of locations, distances anddescriptions of the amenities found along the way. While neither part waspublished, both, in their own way, challenged their status as private texts.The letter had, by the eighteenth century, become a highly convention-alised and valued genre “written to display the author’s rhetorical gracesand intended to be circulated”.60 Placed alongside the appendix, whichmirrored the style of published topographical texts, Diggle’s work existsin a liminal space where the personal and familial nature of the documentmasks its slightly more deliberate and purposeful nature.

Much of the aesthetic rhetoric which had become increasingly debatedand popularised can be found in Diggle’s letters. She often seems to use

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that aesthetic language as a way to frame and organise her experienceswhile travelling. As Kinsley argues, writing and “the act of authorship”are “offered as the means by which meaning and order can be wrought”out of the chaos and otherness found while on tour.61 Diggle saw her-self as a “collector”62 of the experiences which she had been anticipating,associating natural landscapes with the language of the sublime and pic-turesque, and industrial areas with awe and disbelief.

Even though she refers to the sublime in her writing, her motivationsfor travel were largely associated with the picturesque movement, explor-ing a range of views that were romantic and agreeable to the eye. Sheencountered the first of these sights along the east coast border, writing,“I never saw so romantic a spot… nothing was wanting to the scene,the wood pigeon, the waterfall, the rustling of the leaves, the trees dis-posed to captivate the picturesque eye”.63 As she sat taking in the viewshe mused about the kind of person who would call this place their home,exclaiming, “I half expected the hermit and was prepared to entreat himto relate the story of his griefs”.64 Diggle often conflated landscapes withparticular typologies, collecting both along her journey north. Locals,especially those who she described as peasants, played a central role inthis regard, whether they were the barefoot residents of Dunbar65 orthe young girls in ribbons with “simple picturesque appearance”66 inPenicuik. This approach to travel is embedded within the patriotic hometour. Tourists relied on Gilpin’s model as a kind of “distancing strategy”when making contact with spaces and people who fell outside previouslyheld ideals of national identity.67 As Elizabeth Bohls writes, “the touristbecame a disinterested aesthetic subject by eliding the traces of the prac-tical relation between a place and its inhabitants. Human figures in thepicturesque scene were reduced to faceless ornaments, like Gilpin’s ubiq-uitous banditti”.68

While she may have seen herself as a picturesque traveller, in somerespects Diggle seemed far more at home when moving through typi-cal sublime landscapes rather than picturesque ones, perhaps because shealready associated the former with Scotland. When visiting the “famousrumbling Crigg” she describes the waterfall in conventional style: “it isa most magnificent fall of water, a whole river indeed, tumbling downover stupendous craggy rocks with the most curious irregular breaks”,but rather than remain transfixed by the view before her, Diggle crossesover a portion of the rocks and sits down to read one of her sister’s let-ter “to the sublime accompaniment of the dashing water”.69 Unlike in

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previous descriptions of the picturesque where the gaze is foregrounded,here the body, immersed in the sounds and smells of the scene, is placedat the centre, constructing an aesthetic experience which is very muchin “communion”70 with the natural space rather than overwhelmed ordetached from it. Kinsley describes this form of sublimity as “domesti-cated” because it forms the “backdrop to the personal and familial actof reading her sister’s letter”.71 The experience becomes its own conduitwhere both her home and travels pass through each other in a form ofembrace.

Interestingly, the one experience which does provide the visceralimpact associated with previous models of the sublime occurs when Dig-gle participates in a tour of the Carron Iron Works. She writes, “Imaginethe Carron Works, a whole town of smoke and fire, and a thousand peopleat work, furnaces blazing on all sides, half seen through a black smoke…I had never seen in England before, I knew not how to relish the idea, ofso many of my fellow creatures passing their lives there…”.72 But Diggledoesn’t let the sight overwhelm her for long, quickly adding a few lineslater “but I endeavour to reconcile this to myself, by observing that theygrinned with seeming pleasure at our fears and amazement, as if it wasfrom hearts free from care or sorrow…”.73

The letters she sent back home largely evidence how closely Digglefollowed the route which was becoming increasingly fashionable, con-structing parallels and contrasts with her own day to day experiences backin England. While she revelled in the novelty and aesthetic richness ofher tour, she did not enjoy many aspects of actual travel. This meant thatwhile she amassed a wide range of experiences and sites along the way,the tour did not have a great impact on the way in which she under-stood her role as a traveller, or indeed the manner in which she con-ceived of the relationship between the two countries. Scotland remaineda series of ideals already isolated in tropes of familiarity and foreignness:industrial, archaic, remote, picturesque and sublime, none of which wereable to affect Diggle directly. Unlike the previous discourses surround-ing the sublime and the nature of leisure travel in Wordsworth’s guidewhich highlighted the importance of personal growth and the transcen-dence of certain concepts of identity, Diggle’s experiences remained fixedto the appropriate tropes and largely executed in order to fulfil a patrioticcalling. But while her manuscript may only provide subtle variations onpopular travel rhetoric and aesthetic models, it does highlight how theseconcepts were increasingly being addressed and performed by individuals.

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Her letters also represent an important stepping stone towards what wenow consider the contemporary guidebook.

While Diggle preserved a separation between herself and the averageScotsman, Dorothy Wordsworth’s account involved far more of a con-certed effort to develop conversations and relationships with other trav-ellers and those living locally. Travelling to Scotland less than two decadeslater, Dorothy had access to a wide range of practical guides, maps andtravel writing which had been produced in the interim period, along-side her experiences in the Grasmere community.74 As the title suggests,Reflections was not written on tour like Diggle’s letters but back at home“written at leisure…while the events recorded were still vivid in her mem-ory and when she could see the whole tour in something of artistic per-spective”.75 She made successive changes to the manuscript and circulatedversions among her family and acquaintances with the aim of eventualpublication, though Recollections remained unpublished in her lifetime.In this sense her work fits far more comfortably within the realm of thepublic sphere than Diggle’s and there is an overall sense of pace and cohe-sion that reflects the number of times she revisited the text.

Dorothy described the purpose of her tour as “going in search ofscenery”,76 discovering, experiencing and embedding herself in the ebbsand flows of each landscape. In a similar manner to William’s guide,minute sensory details go hand in hand with internal states of mind,and expectations are subtly considered and corrected for her reader. Areaswhich others had described as terror-inducing were redefined through aslightly more reflective use of language. When exploring the Pass of Kil-liecrankie, for example, she exclaims that “The pass did not, however,impress us with awe, or a sensation of difficulty or danger, according toour expectations”77 and in Glen Coe both William and Dorothy agreedthat while their “expectations … had been far surpassed by the grandeurof the mountains, we had upon the whole both been disappointed, andfrom the same cause: we had been prepared for images of terror, hadexpected a deep, den-like valley with overhanging rocks”.78 Dorothy’ssublime was instead defined through far more poetic devices, weavingmemory, imagination and nature. In Loch Lomond, she writes “Thewhole was indeed a strange mixture of soothing and restless images, ofimages inviting to rest, and others hurrying the fancy away into an activ-ity still more pleasing than repose. Yet, intricate and homeless, that is,without lasting abiding-place for the mind, as the prospect was, there was

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no perplexity: we had still a guide to lead us forward”.79 The complex-ity, level of nuance and reference to a whole host of previous aestheticand epistemological debates raise this example of the genre above manyof the other pieces of personal and professional travel writing producedin the period. With each encounter Dorothy was prepared to be trans-formed and with repeated exposure that potential only increased. BothDorothy and William returned to many of the same locations around theTrossachs during the second half of their journey with Dorothy exclaim-ing how “much more interesting” the views and places were once she hada second opportunity to really explore them.80

This complex relationship between man and his natural surroundingsbecomes a central theme throughout the entries. At the outset of theWordsworths’ tour Dorothy writes “Scotland is the country above allothers that I have seen, in which a man of imagination may carve outhis own pleasure. There are so many inhabited solitudes, and the employ-ments of the people are so immediately connected with the places whereyou find them…”.81 Unlike the other English travellers who confinedtheir understanding of the Scottish people to broad stereotypes, Dorothywas particularly interested in the subtle local differences in language andmannerism. She made a concerted effort to develop relationships witheach individual that she met along the way, inquiring about their own pas-sions with regard to literature, pastimes and patterns of daily life. As Hag-glund notes “Unlike the accounts of many other travellers who related tothe places and cultures through which they travelled almost exclusivelythrough visual stimuli, within Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel narrative thevisual and social takes on equal importance”.82

These conversations, no matter how brief, conjure endless unique por-traits of the variety of people that she met and often relied on along theway. In one encounter she writes, “Our guide repeated over and overagain his lamentations that the day was so bad, though we had often toldhim – not indeed with much hope that he would believe us – that we wereglad of it. As we walked along he pulled a leafy twig from a birch-tree,and, after smelling it, gave it to me, saying, how ‘sweet and halesome’ itwas, and that it was pleasant and very halesome on a fine summer’s morn-ing to sail under the banks where the birches are growing.”83 This singlemoment constructs a series of links in Dorothy’s mind, from her previ-ous conversations with other guides, to the particular landscapes aroundLoch Achray, and all the way back home to the birch trees she used togaze upon in the north of England.

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This attempt to explore the subtler daily patterns of communities andfamilies while on tour was not typical of the increasing number of Englishtravellers. Most relied heavily on guidebooks and the inns and routesrecommended therein. That is not to say that Dorothy travelled free ofthe tropes and prejudices circulating among other tourists though. AsHagglund suggests, her various interactions were often laden with par-ticular value judgements based on language, class and education whichoften privileged communities in the Lowlands over those in the High-lands.84 But Dorothy did attempt to reflect on these initial assumptionsand deepen her relationship with the locals that she had met in both areasby returning to the hospitality of one family during her first excursion,and writing about the people she had met in 1803 again when she touredScotland in 1822.85

Many of these reflections were symptomatic of the larger overarchingtravel ideology which she shared with her brother. For the Wordsworthsexcursive walking, poetry-making and farming became understood as “in-terchangeable labours”86 completely, and often problematically, effacingany socio-economic distinctions between the three. Unlike “true travel”,referring to both Grand and picturesque tours, Wallace argues that theperipatetic emerged directly from the georgic providing an intimate rela-tionship with a landscape which mirrored more traditional patterns andprocesses. While the former situated itself in the validation of specific des-tinations which could be isolated and addressed as single views or pictures,excursive walking attempted to do away with the necessity of these frames,amplifying the precariousness already embedded in the previous quest forthe perfect view.

That is not to say that the walking tours extolled by the Wordsworths’did away with frames entirely. As we have seen with regard to home tours,both the writing process and competing aesthetic models were used asways to isolate and contain the vast amount of “foreign” phenomenaexperienced while moving through the landscape on foot. In this senseDorothy and Diggle relied on the same grounding processes to focus theeye, body and mind. But while spaces and natural details which had beenpreviously aligned to the picturesque were easily assembled and appre-ciated, those vast and overwhelming spaces found to the north whichwere associated with the sublime were much more difficult “to organizethrough language”.87 While Diggle continued to use physical and linguis-tic frames in order to distance herself from these spaces, the Wordsworths’turned to other approaches in order to address the precariousness of

2 HOME AND AWAY: THE RISE OF THE WALKING TOUR … 43

sublimity and otherness, including patterned routes and limited, thoughmoving, viewpoints.

These routes were very often locally inspired rather than attached tofar off views and monuments and were marked by a circular sequenceof leaving and returning back again. Not only did these footpaths trainthe observer to appreciate the view but they became rewards in and ofthemselves88 which eventually transformed the pedestrian’s perspectiveof home. In this sense walking became far more than a purely aestheticprocess but, as an essential part of poetic production, it could provideboth moral and psychological revelations about oneself and one’s com-munity. Walking takes a person out into nature and also brings himhome. So, unlike the traditional idea of travel which strongly discour-aged ties with new communities and used aesthetic frames as a “meansof countering anxieties about foreignness”,89 the excursive walking thatthe Wordsworths prescribed did not support a strict dichotomy of eitherhome and abroad or journey and destination. Deliberate walking for itsown sake, which allows its participants to re-engage with their local envi-ronments, is equated with stability; “wandering becomes not a relaxationof body and mind, a withdrawal from community… but a deliberate,directed labour undertaken to make self and home”,90 which illuminatedthe importance of the process in both constructing and disrupting thestationary form of contemplation associated with the dichotomy of homeand abroad.

Ideologically, walking provided a way to preserve a direct link with theidealised, pastoral landscape of the pre-enclosure era. It offered a way forupper and middle class tourists to combat the increasing infringements ofindustrialisation and mechanisation which were also largely to blame forthe decline of traditional agricultural practices.91 It became the tie thatbound the past, present and future. Alongside guides directing walkingtours, critical and theoretical texts applying many of Wordsworth’s practi-cal and ideological components rose in popularity in the mid-nineteenthcentury. Like the Grand and picturesque tours before it, the walking tour,and more particularly, the home tour, became “a sign not only of delib-erate making of self but, to a certain extent, of the freedom from otherlabours, the leisure, in which to do so”.92 Walking, as cultural ideologyand piece of national identity became a “timeless authorial activity”,93

quickly assuaging rising fears about what the new modern Britain wouldin fact be.

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The discourse surrounding the cultural industry eventually embracedthe walking tour as its natural central cog. But the practice didn’t slowthe expansion of other modes of travel which were much easier for theindustry to commodify. Rather it took on different roles depending onthe socio-economic circumstance of the participant; families could taketo rambling for their holiday after travelling from an urban centre on thetrain or individuals could tour locally as part of a weekly or perhaps evendaily routine. Excursive walking and the sublime went hand in hand, theywere the practical and theoretical points at which the imagination andnature could begin to converge providing the potential for the emer-gence of the poetic eye. While the natural sublime acted as a catalystfor nature appreciation, and eventually, the walking tour, the continu-ous process of moving through space also transformed the sublime intoan experience which could, at times, be explored through language and,eventually through photography and film.

Walking, as an ideology, became a central tenet of the national identity,allowing pastoral roots to intermesh with the industrialised future, whilealso providing a manner in which to disperse the lingering anxiety pro-duced by the encroachment of the latter. This sense of precariousness inrelation to cultural and national identity structures only increased whenit passed across the English border into Scotland. There walking tookon competing methodological features, it built relationships and connec-tions or was used as a tool to stake out and claim a space as one’s own.In both cases it was the landscapes themselves which acted as the lensin which to see and understand the communities who lived there, firmlycapturing each area in a rhetorical border. Understanding the nature ofthese conceptual and cultural borders within the context of the emerg-ing industry surrounding nature appreciation would have a fundamentalimpact on the scenic film who capitalised on the complexity and power ofthese discourses several decades later.

Notes1. Zoë Kinsley, Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 (Hampshire: Ash-

gate, 2008), 8–9.2. Elizabeth Hagglund, Tourists and Travellers; Women’s Non-fictionional

Writing about Scotland, 1770–1830 (PhD Thesis: University of Birming-ham, 2000), 16.

3. Kinsley, 12.4. James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: The Familiar Letters of James Howell

(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co, 1907), 113.

2 HOME AND AWAY: THE RISE OF THE WALKING TOUR … 45

5. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory; theDevelopment of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1959), 69.

6. Nicolson, 143.7. Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque; Studies in a Point of View (Hamden,

CT: Archon Books, 1967), 12.8. Hussey, 84.9. Nicolson, 212.

10. Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth: Containing an Accountof the Original of the Earth, and of all the General Changes Which ItHath Already Undergone, or Is to Undergo, Till the Consummation of AllThings. In Two Volumes. The Two First Books Concerning the Deluge, andConcerning Paradise. The Two Last Books Concerning the Burning of theWorld, and Concerning the New Heavens and New Earth. With a Reviewof the Theory, and of Its Proofs; Especially in Reference to Scripture. TheSixth Edition. To Which Is Added, the Author’s Defence of the Work, fromthe Exceptions of Mr. Warren, and the Examination of Mr. Keil. And anOde to the Author by Mr. Addison (London: Printed for J. Hooke, 1719),I, 176.

11. Burnet, I, 158.12. Burnet, I, 191–192.13. John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E.N. Hooker, 2

vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), II, 380–381,as quoted in Andrew Ashfield and Peter De Bolla, “Part II: Rhapsodyto rhetoric,” in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aes-thetic Theory, eds. Andrew Ashfield and Peter De Bolla (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1996), 59, see also Nicolson, 278.

14. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure andPsychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1976), 23.

15. Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas ofthe Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford England: OxfordUniversity Press, 1990), 123.

16. See Samantha Wilson, “The Aesthetics of Immersion and Detachmentin the British Natural Sublime: A Historical Perspective,” Environment,Space, Place 9, no. 1 (2017): 43–62.

17. Some theorists referred to this process through the symbolism of theframe. For example, Alexander Gerard refers to a “spreading” of one’simagination across the depth and breadth of the natural phenomena whichin turn “enlivens and invigorates” the internal “frame” established by theimagination in the first place. See Gerard “An Essay on Taste,” in TheSublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, 168.

46 S. WILSON

18. Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Originsand Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1993), 10.

19. Wallace, 39.20. Philip Bagwell, The Transport Revolution from 1700 (London: B.T. Bats-

ford, 1974), 43.21. Wallace, 10.22. Wallace, 10.23. See Chapter 3 for a wider discussion of the impact of the Enclosure laws.24. Kinsley, 2.25. Kinsley, 2.26. Celia Fiennes, “To the Reader”, in The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed.

Christopher Morris (London, 1947), 1–2 cited in Kinsley, 1.27. Kinsley, 3.28. Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and

Lancashire: 1784 (Oxford: Woodstock, 1989), 56.29. West, 11.30. William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel,

and on Sketching Landscape: With a Poem on Landscape Painting: To TheseAre Now Added, Two Essays Giving an Account of the Principles and Modein Which the Author Executed His Own Drawings, 3rd ed. (London: T.Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), 48.

31. Gilpin, 47.32. Jonathan Wordsworth, “Introduction,” in A Guide to the Lakes in Cum-

berland, Westmorland and Lancashire: 1784 (Oxford: Woodstock, 1989),1.

33. William Wordsworth, “The Brothers, A Pastoral Poem,” in Lyrical Ballads1798 and 1800, eds. Dahlia Porter and Michael Gamer (Peterborough,Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), 301, lines 1–10.

34. “Tintern Abbey, Tourism and Romantic Landscape: William Wordsworthfrom Guide to the Lakes,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature(2010).

35. William Wordsworth, “Letter to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807,” in TheLetters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. E deSelincourt, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), I, 128.

36. William Wordsworth, “Letter to Lady Beaumont, 10 May 1810,” in TheLetter of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. E deSelincourt, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), I, 370.

37. Ernest de Selincourt, “Introduction,” in Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakeswith an Introduction, Appendices, and Notes Textual and Illustrative.(London: Henry Frowde, 1906), xii.

38. Selincourt, xvi.

2 HOME AND AWAY: THE RISE OF THE WALKING TOUR … 47

39. William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes with an Introduc-tion, Appendices, and Notes Textual and Illustrative, 5th ed. (London:Henry Frowde, 1906), 100.

40. William Wordsworth, Guide, 22.41. William Wordsworth, Guide, 5.42. William Wordsworth, Guide, 64.43. William Wordsworth, Guide, 2144. William Wordsworth, Guide, 97.45. Wallace, 68.46. Wallace, 68.47. Alastair J. Durie, Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scot-

land, 1780–1939 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003), 35.48. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Peter

Levi (London: Penguin, 1984), 96 as cited in Hagglund, 16.49. Charles Withers, “The Historical Creation of the Scottish Highlands,” in

The Manufacture of Scottish History, eds. Ian Donnachie and ChristopherWhatley (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), 145.

50. Withers, 151.51. John R. Gold and Gold, Margaret M., Imagining Scotland: Tradition,

Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism Since 1750 (London:Routledge, 1995), 42.

52. Gold and Gold, 43.53. Durie, 21.54. A. Mitchell, “A List of Travels, Tours, etc., Relating to Scotland,” in

Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 35 (1901): 431.55. Hagglund, 17.56. Durie, 39.57. While Diggle travelled up through the east coast she describes the

west coast route (including ratings of different accommodations) in herappendix for a would-be traveller.

58. The Scots Magazine, 34 (1772), 19 as cited in Hagglund, 23.59. Hagglund, 22–23.60. Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: John

Hopkins University Press, 1993), 35 as cited in Hagglund, 7.61. Kinsley, 25.62. Kinsley, 26.63. Elizabeth Diggle, Journal of a Tour to the Highlands of Scotland (London,

1788), 19.64. Diggle, 19.65. Diggle, 23.66. Diggle, 31.67. Hagglund, 113.

48 S. WILSON

68. Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics,1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13 as citedin Hagglund, 79.

69. Diggle, 36–37.70. Kinsley, 113.71. Kinsley, 11372. Diggle, 59–60.73. Diggle, 60.74. Hagglund, 137.75. Ernest de Selincourt, “Preface,” in Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (Lon-

don: Macmillan, 1941), I: vii.76. Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D.

1803, ed. J. C. Shairp (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1875), 51.77. Dorothy Wordsworth, 207.78. Dorothy Wordsworth, 178.79. Dorothy Wordsworth, 75.80. Dorothy Wordsworth, 221.81. Dorothy Wordsworth, 25–26.82. Hagglund, 142.83. Dorothy Wordsworth, 102.84. Hagglund, 143.85. Hagglund, 159.86. Wallace, 106.87. Kinsley, 87.88. Wallace, 170.89. Kinsley, 79.90. Wallace, 122.91. Wallace, 149.92. Wallace, 170.93. Wallace, 173.

References

Ashfield, Andrew, and Peter De Boll (eds.). 1996. The Sublime: A Reader inBritish Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Bagwell, Philip. 1974. The Transport Revolution from 1700. London: B.T. Bats-ford.

Bohls, Elizabeth A. 1995. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics,1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burke, Edmund. 1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideasof the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

2 HOME AND AWAY: THE RISE OF THE WALKING TOUR … 49

Burnet, Thomas. 1719. The Sacred Theory of the Earth: Containing an Accountof the Original of the Earth, and of All the General Changes Which It HathAlready Undergone, or Is to Undergo, Till the Consummation of All Things.In Two Volumes. The Two First Books Concerning the Deluge, and ConcerningParadise. The Two Last Books Concerning the Burning of the World, and Con-cerning the New Heavens and New Earth. With a Review of the Theory, andof Its Proofs; especially in reference to Scripture. The Sixth Edition. To which Isadded, the Author’s Defence of the Work, from the Exceptions of Mr. Warren,and the Examination of Mr. Keil. And an Ode to the Author by Mr. Addison.London: printed for John Hooke.

Dennis, John. 1939. The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E.N. Hooker, 2 vols.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Diggle, Elizabeth. 1788. Journal of a Tour to the Highlands of Scotland. London.Durie, Alastair J. 2003. Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scot-

land, 1780–1939. East Linton: Tuckwell.Ezell, Margaret J.M. 1993. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: John

Hopkins University Press.Fiennes, Celia. 1947. The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris. Lon-

don: Cresset Press.Gerard, Alexander. 1996. An Essay on Taste. In The Sublime: A Reader in British

Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter De Bolla,168–172. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gilpin, William. 1808. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel,and on Sketching Landscape: With a Poem on Landscape Painting: To These AreNow Added, Two Essays Giving an Account of the Principles and Mode in Whichthe Author Executed His Own Drawings, 3rd ed. London: T. Cadell and W.Davies.

Gold, John R., and Margaret M. Gold. 1995. Imagining Scotland: Tradition,Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism Since 1750. London: Rout-ledge.

Hagglund, Elizabeth. 2000. Tourists and Travellers; Women’s Non-fictionionalWriting About Scotland, 1770–1830. PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham.

Howell, James. 1907. Epistolae Ho-Elianae: The Familiar Letters of James Howell.Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.

Hussey, Christopher. 1967. The Picturesque; Studies in a Point of View. Hamden,CT: Archon Books.

Johnson, Samuel. 1984. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. PeterLevi. London: Penguin.

Kinsley, Zoë. 2008. Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812. Hampshire: Ash-gate.

Mitchell, A. 1901. A List of Travels, Tours, etc., Relating to Scotland. Proceedingsof the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 35: 431.

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1772. A New Tour Through Scotland Recommended. The Scots Magazine 34,January: 19–21.

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. 1959. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory; theDevelopment of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Wallace, Anne D. 1993. Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Originsand Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Weiskel, Thomas. 1976. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure andPsychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

West, Thomas, and Jonathan Wordsworth. 1989. A Guide to the Lakes in Cum-berland, Westmorland and Lancashire: 1784. Oxford: Woodstock.

Wilson, Samantha. 2017. The Aesthetics of Immersion and Detachment in theBritish Natural Sublime: A Historical Perspective. Environment, Space, Place9 (1): 43–62.

Withers, Charles. 1992. The Historical Creation of the Scottish Highlands. InThe Manufacture of Scottish History, ed. Ian Donnachie and ChristopherWhatley, 143–156. Edinburgh: Polygon.

Wordsworth, Dorothy. 1894. Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D.1803, ed. J. C. Shairp. Edinburgh: David Douglas.

———. 1941. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. London:Macmillan.

Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2008. Lyrical Ballads 1798and 1800, eds. Dahlia Porter and Michael Gamer. Peterborough, Ontario:Broadview Press.

Wordsworth, William, and Ernest De Selincourt. 1906. Wordsworth’s Guide to theLakes with an Introduction, Appendices, and Notes Textual and Illustrative,5th ed. London: Henry Frowde.

Wordsworth, William. 1937. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: TheMiddle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

———. 1979. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context andReception, Recent Critical Essays, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams,and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton.

W. W. Norton and Company. 2010. Tintern Abbey, Tourism and Roman-tic Landscape: William Wordsworth from Guide to the Lakes. The Nor-ton Anthology of English Literature. https://wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_1/welcome.htm. Accessed June 6, 2014.

CHAPTER 3

Mapping, Ordering and Recordingthe Tourist’s Landscape

Abstract This chapter interrogates the role of the moving image inattracting ever larger groups of middle class English and Scottish touriststo different regions of Scotland. The chapter is especially interested in themanner in which these early, often sponsored, films replicated the patternsestablished by the guidebook genre and emphasised the importance ofcollection and juxtaposition, whether of landscapes or communities. Bythe turn of the twentieth century various new forms of representationaltechnology were utilizing tropes associated with collecting to promoteand sustain travel and tourism. One of most prolific companies in thisregard was the Charles Urban Trading Company which produced scenicand travel films across the globe for the British screen. Scotland became akey centrepiece for many of the company’s collections, providing a liminalspace which existed on the periphery of the nation.

Keywords Scenic filmmaking · Scotland · Collections · Charles Urban ·Travel and tourism

Travel extends to movement through both familiar and not so famil-iar spaces, often relying on the interplay of home and away to producemeaning. As was explored in the previous chapter, movement is medi-ated by a range of complex material constraints, cultural debates andphysical texts and technologies, like the guidebook. Historically, each ofthese objects and discourses responded to aspects of a larger debate about

© The Author(s) 2020S. Wilson, Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Film,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39153-9_3

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the purpose and performance of nature appreciation. Modes of spectator-ship associated with concepts like the sublime and picturesque attemptedto provide frameworks for competing styles of appreciation which eitherforegrounded reflexive or affirmative experiences. While each emphasisedthe importance of dramatically different forms of movement and fram-ing, they both extolled the virtues of a particular set of behaviours inorder to prepare before going out or reflect on the experience once backhome. These models of collection would help transform nature appreci-ation from an activity practiced by a few to an industry which made theexperience a central part of any period of leisure for the many.

Collecting comprises a set of behaviours which help an individual orgroup identify and accumulate objects, signs and/or experiences.1 Thatprocess helps create a unifying narrative about both the purpose andprocess of travel. Collections and collecting behaviour have a profoundimpact on the manner in which communities and individuals conceptu-alise their own spatial identities. By the turn of the twentieth century, var-ious new forms of representational technology were utilising tropes asso-ciated with collecting to promote and sustain travel and tourism acrossGreat Britain and its colonies. Early film, in particular, was able to collectboth domestic and foreign sites and views for those members of the pub-lic who could not physically go on tour. The genres most closely associ-ated with tourism, namely travelogues and scenics, often followed a strictformula mirroring the conventions held by popular guidebooks at thetime. This meant that both actuality genres performed all the roles of acollector—mapping routes, ordering sites, documenting the process andproviding a thematic thru line.

While many of the scenics that have survived remain in a fragmentedstate, production catalogues provide ample evidence of the breadth andcontent of these collections. One of the most prolific in this regard wasthe Charles Urban Trading Company. Scotland became a key centrepiecefor many of the company’s collections, providing a liminal space whichexisted on the periphery of the nation. That space showcased Scotlandas a series of contradictions whereby the past and future were inextrica-bly linked through the natural and built landscape. This chapter exploresthe role different collecting methodologies had on the manner in whichUrban exploited the Scottish landscape. The production company con-structed an interplay between immersive and detached imagery in orderto capture the rhetoric of home and away which made Scotland such aproblematic feature of British colonialism. The catalogues provide furtherevidence of the importance of collecting in the process of defining con-tested spaces.

3 MAPPING, ORDERING AND RECORDING THE TOURIST’S LANDSCAPE 53

Collecting Space and Place

The same areas which were popular in guidebooks and leisure tours dur-ing the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continued to attract vis-itors and attention around the turn of the twentieth century, includingScotland, Wales, Devon and Cornwall. As we have seen, the former hada complex and often uneasy relationship with the emerging travel andtourism industry in the rest of Britain. Many of the motivations driv-ing travellers north had little to do with the actual communities wholived there, rather Scotland became a potent symbol of British identity, aplace which existed on the periphery of both the past and present. Urbanexploited these embedded narratives by testing the role of collecting inconstructing and rehearsing methods of experiencing and understandinglandscape and identity. By exploring the theme of travel as introspectionthe company’s collection straddles the two most prominent ways in whichwe classify both the former and latter, as a place of immersive dwelling oras a site of detached occupation.

As Hayden Lorimer and Katrin Lund argue, collecting behaviour is notalways focused directly on the final collection; rather the process can oftenbe a haphazard interplay between mapping, ordering and recording, espe-cially when it is concerned with spaces and experiences. In Lorimer andLund’s work on Munroists, walking and collecting become interrelatedaspects of the “social encounter”,2 signalling an overlap between immer-sive and contemplative models of spectatorship. Tim Ingold and Jo LeeVergunst describe the practice through the flâneur stating that

the Munroist collects things with his feet rather than his hands, that is,by going about. Mountains can be collected in any order, under all sortsof weather conditions, yielding a trail that, were it mapped out, would beas haphazard, labyrinthine and contingent upon circumstance as that ofthe flâneur, and, if retold, as replete with the apparently trivial and theincidental.3

Here the peripatetic provides collectors with the opportunity to applymethodical recording and gathering techniques to constantly changingcircumstances and environments, utilising the body as well as sight andthe mind to construct experiences and judgements.

Almost all leisure travel is built around some form of the collectionmotif. Creating and mapping an itinerary, recording the experiences,accumulating objects associated with each site and archiving the photos,

54 S. WILSON

films, descriptions and objects once home all form important parts of theprocess of consolidating memory and constructing a narrative about thetrip. That process experienced both in situ and back at home providesthe basis for what Lorimer and Lund call the “production and perfor-mance of landscape”.4 While many aspects of travel and collection mayremain similar, the epistemological and aesthetic goals can differ signifi-cantly between individuals and groups, creating distinct and often para-doxical assumptions about specific landscapes and the communities wholive in them. These separate modalities rely on what Tim Ingold definedas either a sense of inhabiting or occupying specific spaces.5 As KennethOlwig describes, referring to both Ingold and Doctor Johnson’s muchearlier definition, “The first modality engenders a sense of belonging thatgenerates landscape as the place of dwelling and doing in the body politicof a community, whereas the second constructs a feeling of possession andstaged performance in a hierarchical social space”.6

These two opposing ways of performing within and through landscapessuggests just how complex narratives of collecting can be. Tourists tendto be classified as part of the second form of encounter, relying on adetached yet “possessive one-eye gaze of the surveyor”.7 Olwig describesthe contemporary tourist as someone who can only “appreciate land-scape” once it is under his or her control by way of an organised tour,camera or guidebook.8 These accessories and the models of spectator-ship developed by the collector therefore not only construct a particularrelationship between the traveller, landscape and the people he may meetwhile on tour but also extend to the narratives that the traveller uses tounderstand his own role and goals as a tourist.

Early cinema played a central role in articulating and marketing differ-ent models of collecting behaviour to a variety of audiences. Appearingfirst alongside variety acts, magic lantern shows and in travelling fairs,the earliest “living pictures” attracted audiences who hadn’t had the sameopportunities to travel as extensively as the first few waves of tourists. R.W. Paul displayed the first projected moving pictures to a paying audi-ence in March 1896, and, little over a decade later, there were morethan a dozen production companies situated in Great Britain, many ofwhich were producing upwards of two hundred films a year.9 For thatfirst decade, individual pictures and select programmes were sold and thenrented directly to showmen and exhibitors. The earliest non-fiction mov-ing pictures were overwhelmingly concerned with capturing the everyday.These single shot actuality films made up the vast majority of output by

3 MAPPING, ORDERING AND RECORDING THE TOURIST’S LANDSCAPE 55

producers up until 1906.10 While foreign views would become more pop-ular by the turn of the century, British producers dedicated most of theirenergy to domestic views and attractions.

The early actuality film dealt with concerns over the competing valuesassociated with nature appreciation within its formal structure. The filmsdid more than just place the British countryside in front of a whole newclass of spectators; they actively contributed to the debate over the roleof leisure travel and natural spaces within the construction of identity.In some cases, this contribution occurred at the level of subject matterand in other cases through the camera movement and editing patterns.Understanding scenics and travelogues as integral parts of this ongoingdebate not only redefines and complicates the meaning structures builtinto the aesthetics of each genre but also the manner in which an increas-ing reliance on virtual travel transformed the relationship of space andplace as well as home and away.

The Emergence of the Scenic

Scenic films were one of the first genres to circulate domestic landscapes.Like other early genres and subgenres, the scenic often suffers from thesame hierarchical narratives as those used to differentiate historical periodswithin the field; both are tied directly to the assumption that early film-making was only the first simplistic stepping stone on the way to eventu-ally developing into what we now consider the institutional model. RachelLow, one of the first film historians to map the British industry, uses thislinear thru line to define the initial genres of actuality filmmaking as ifeach exemplified a stage in the larger development. She employs the term“scenic” to describe the second stage, differentiating between the firstactualities which were single shot static films of interest “merely from thecuriosity of seeing familiar sights reproduced on screen”,11 and those filmswhich employed camera movement like pans and tracking shots. Travelfilms tended to occur much later, employing multiple shots made up ofboth camera movement and static shots. Unlike the two earlier categories,travel films were usually of interest because of their subject matter ratherthan as pure examples of the new medium.

In contrast, I will be using the term “scenic” in a much broader sensewhich is closer in line with the variety of films associated with the termby the production companies at the time.12 Rather than use the term

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to distinguish between purely formal shifts, I will employ it to differen-tiate between any film which presented a domestic natural landscape asopposed to a foreign one. By using the term in this manner I am ableto examine these films in relation to the larger tourism industry in GreatBritain, interpreting them as complex documents which used many differ-ent formal devices in order to present new points of view on traditionalpicturesque and sublime subject matter.

This broad definition of the genre takes into account the very differ-ent trajectory that films depicting natural landscape enacted. Unlike inthe case of narrative filmmaking, which exhibited a certain transitionalarc in the first decade of the 1900s, scenic actualities tended to exhibitmany of the same stylistic traits from approximately the beginning of thetransitional era of fictional narratives up until the First World War. Thisstability makes it difficult to compare both groups against the same his-torical framework. André Gaudreault has recently developed a historicalmethodology based on the intermedial nature of early film which I willbe adopting to a certain degree. Gaudreault hypothesises that the worksproduced with the “kinematograph” in its first two decades were investedin the cultural series which came before them rather than with the insti-tutional form of cinema that occurred after: “…‘cinema’- as we generallyunderstand it today- was not a late-nineteenth-century invention. Theemergence of cinema, in the sense we understand the term today, datesinstead from the 1910s”,13 the year when previous models would date theemergence of the institutional mode. Prior to that shift, the technologybecame incorporated within a diversity of other practices and institutions.Gaudreault considers the period to be a product of “intermedial mesh-ing”: “Before the cinema ended up becoming a relatively autonomousmedium, kinematography was not merely subjected to the influence ofthe other media and cultural spaces in vogue at the beginning of thetwentieth century. It truly was at one and the same time magic lanternshow, fairy play, magic act, and music hall or vaudeville act”.14 “Inter-mediality” refers to this preliminary, transitional stage prior to becominga stable institution, and, also is the best way to approach the historicalperiod. What this suggests is that in order to understand and interpretspecific films made within the early period one must locate the culturalinstitutions (which may include multiple different forms of media, tech-nology and conventions) they were embedded within. This book arguesthat British actuality filmmaking which fell under the category of scenic

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was a part of the larger cultural series associated with nature apprecia-tion. These scenic films participated within and restructured the aestheticand epistemological conventions commonly shared by these cultural prac-tices and objects. And, unlike fictional narrative filmmaking which shiftedinto the “institutional mode”, scenics and other travelogues, continuedto exhibit spectatorial qualities associated with the first decade of produc-tion well into the next, providing evidence of the central role these genresplayed within the larger tourism industry.

Scenic films collected a range of experiences and views which fell intoboth the picturesque and sublime categories and replicated many parts ofthe discourse that accompanied the larger movement surrounding natureappreciation.15 The production houses chose and framed subject matterwhich not only would demonstrate the power of the medium but wouldalso present and maximise the pictorial qualities valued by each aestheticmovement. By privileging the act of display, the scenic film allowed theaudience members to feel as if they were making contact with places thatthey would not always be able to experience in reality, explicitly placingthe genre within the lineage of the various nature tours while implic-itly drawing on formal associations with landscape art. The most obviousexample of the first characteristic is the multitude of films depicting water-falls and the so-called “rock and waves” films, which, when shot up-closeor looking over the edge, like in the case of the R. W. Paul’s Rocky Shore(1896) and Rough Sea at Ramsgate (1896), created a powerful visceraleffect that mirrored the experiences of the sublime described in earlierguides and topographical writing.16

Audience attitudes towards the new technology and attraction providefurther evidence of the role actuality programming played in the popu-lar imagination. After attending the 1895 actuality programme on displayin Derby Castle on the Isle of Man one audience member stated, “Byits means the following, all working as if in life before the spectator, areshown”.17 Another, this time a reviewer for The Era reporting on hisexperience at the New Egyptian Hall, described the medium “as picturesof photography come to life – photography taken ‘in the action.’”18 Thiswriter went on to exclaim that “the interest of Mr R. W. Paul’s inven-tion is inexhaustible, for the attraction may be revived again and again bynew pictures”. Audiences of course did not encounter these images with-out substantial mediation. Alongside the complex traditions and debatesthat these films gestured to were a range of promotional materials and

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showmen who “presented, introduced, announced and familiarized”audiences before, during and after performances.19 These lecturersbecame, as Germain Lacasse argues, both the “proof of attraction” andthe “voice of attraction” providing narration prior to “its integration intofilms”.20 Like the local tour guide before them, they were able to buildanticipation, provide instruction as to where a spectator should focus theirattention as well as offer location and audience-specific anecdotes.

Theorist William Uricchio argues that much of what made these staticscenic shots popular was their “liveness” or “simultaneity” which pro-vided “an experience essentially identical to coincident profilmic reality”21

that came directly out of concerns developed within the late nineteenth-century discourses surrounding technology, many of which mirrored thetensions over the role of representation in environmental aesthetics.22

The films functioned as “articulated explorations of a particular location”where “intervention (of the filmmaker, of the marks of civilization) is keptto a minimum”.23 The same locations were filmed over and over again,so that while audiences were interested in accessing unique events andnovel locations, the majority of the time they would come to see the sametypes of scenery that they had previously viewed multiple times. Uricchiowrites that the technology served “as a conduit for ongoing repeatableprocesses”.24 Audiences came to experience a certain visceral effect asso-ciated with contact with these locations. One audience member remarkedupon “the whizzing and the whirling and twittering of nerves, and blink-ings and winkings that it causes in not a few among the spectators”.25

Repeated viewings gave them the opportunity to examine new facets ofthese locations at the same time as consider the manner in which thetechnology mediated that contact. When edited together in later films,that “liveness” could be compared and contemplated through the juxta-position of possible vantage points foregrounding point of view over thevisual appeal of the chosen locations.26

Scenic and travel films became increasingly important as performativeguides for would-be travellers. They became recognised as collections intheir own right, assembling views and experiences for the spectator. But,just like the guides before them, scenics existed within a nexus of culturaland political discourses and expressed their own value-laden narrativesabout the spaces and people they displayed. Domestically this was mostacute when British companies turned their attention towards Scotland.

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Charles Urban’s Scotland

A vast array of British and international production companies utilisedScotland as the setting for their scenic and travel films, including Hep-worth, Kineto, Barker, Pathé, Gaumont and Urban.27 The latter playeda key role in the construction of the scenic genre and the vast expan-sion of the tourism industry across Scotland. Between 1905 and 1909,fifty percent of films produced in Britain remained non-fiction and out ofthat total Charles Urban’s company produced half.28 After retiring fromthe industry, Urban would describe film in relation to other technologieswhich began as scientific instruments or novelties then expanded to even-tually take on informative roles in society: “I saw great instructive valuein the motion picture as an educational factor, just as the talking machineis now used as a dictograph and the study of language… Throughout myentire connection with the motion picture industry I have specialised ineducational subjects of science, travel and topical episodes, now referredto as ‘documentary’ films”.29 As Luke McKernan notes in his biographyexamining Urban’s role in the industry, “Urban’s dedication to the non-fiction film ran counter to that which the market was starting to dictate”in 1903.30

In the first Urban Trading Company catalogue, travel films took prideof place at the very beginning. Cameras and projection equipment alsohad a prominent role, filling forty-six of the last pages. This pairing oftravel and cinematic technology repeats throughout the company’s pub-lications, from photographs of the camera operators working in differentlocations to the slogan “We Put the World Before You” featured on eachcover. The camera was able to replicate the complete experience of travel,to put its audiences in contact with a whole range of sites, from exoticlocations in the colonies to popular middle class leisure destinations acrossGreat Britain.

Even though Urban didn’t arrive in Britain before he was thirty, hewas keen to address the nationalistic overtones of the film industry. Whilehe may have imported quite a lot of American technology and trade, heattempted to balance this with the films that he produced himself, espe-cially in the travel and scenic genre. A great many of them involved toursacross regions of Great Britain with the larger aim of eventually filmingevery part of the nation. Not surprisingly the same areas which were pop-ular in guidebooks and leisure tours just prior featured predominantly.

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Early catalogue entries list individual films depicting waterfalls, phantomrides, elevated views, ocean views and small-town street views shot in loca-tions across Britain. By 1907 each of these subgenres was placed in alarger series dedicated to touring a specific region. For example, in 1909,Urban listed nine films (which could also be sold in different individualsections) dedicated to Scotland, five of which ran longer than four hun-dred feet and involved quite a few different types of scenes or views. Thelayout of each regional collection tended to be quite similar, involvingnumerous films shot along rail lines, topical films depicting local indus-tries and leisure activities and scenic films documenting the most populartourist sites.

Scotland became increasingly important to the company. In 1906Urban produced the Bonnie Scotland series with twenty-seven titles. Forthe tourist, the catalogue recommends the Scottish scenes “of picturesquebeauty – sublime, awe-inspiring, wild, weird and magnificent” including“Battlefields, Castles, Mountains, Passes, Lochs and Rivers”. The seriesclaimed to capture “every point of the Beauty and Natural Life of Scot-land, from the Border to the Far North of the Outer Hebrides” including“revelations” about Scottish culture and the environment which had pre-viously remained out of reach for most middle class viewers and tourists.31

The 1906 catalogue thanked the cooperation and assistance of theLondon & North Western Railway, Caledonian Railway, Highland Rail-way and David MacBrayne’s Steamers, describing the production as “themost comprehensive animated series of Scotland and its Beauties everpublished”.32 This relationship with the established excursion industrymeant that Scotland wasn’t so much seen through the eyes of a tourist orresident but through the windows of a moving train or boat. Many of thetitles within the collection used phantom rides, and rail and boat panora-mas, as their primary vehicle for documentation, perfectly replicating theexcursion traffic already happening en masse across the west coast andportions of the east coast. Steamboats framed trips down the Clyde, fromRothesay to Oban, as well as up through parts of the Highlands along themost popular lochs. Some films used two or more forms of transport likethe trip from Glasgow to Oban which began on rail then switched to asteamboat, or Urban’s Trossachs, Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond, whichbegan as a railway panorama before utilising a coach and steamboat alongboth Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond. In this sense the cinematographerperformed the role of a typical late nineteenth-century leisure traveller, heremained tied to the complex transport timetable and suffered from the

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same inevitable setbacks based therein, like terrible sea conditions whilelanding on the Isle of Staffa.33

The production catalogue descriptions not only highlighted populartourist itineraries but also categorised potential audiences through thetypical motivations of leisure travellers during the period: “the historian,the antiquarian, the lover of Sir Walter Scott”34 as well as “the tourist,the sportsman” and “the lover of the Romantics, and the Seeker of theUnusual”.35 But Urban didn’t just speak to an audience who was alreadyable to participate in leisure travel, as this description in Edinburgh PartI states, he also relied on the large group of the British population whocould not; “In addition [to the previous groups], those who can neverhope to undertake the journey will have the beauties of the ancient capi-tal brought to their doors”.36

Placing the “world before your eyes” was key to the educational aspi-rations held by the company. That often meant promoting the experi-ential components alongside a constructed dichotomy of reality versus“fakism”.37 Here “reality” was defined as filmed on location, outsidecontrolled sets, something which the catalogue argued that the pub-lic demanded. The catalogue descriptions used atmospheric effects andstereoscopic depth to impress upon the reader the power of cinemato-graph. These immersive effects described by the catalogues quickly seguedinto the aesthetic language of the Romantics, allowing spectators to notonly participate in the larger cultural practice but also perform a slightlymore select role; that of picturesque explorers. As we have seen, Scot-land had attracted nature enthusiasts drawn in by literary descriptions ofits sublime and awe-inspiring landscapes for more than a century. In asimilar manner to the Lake District, middle class travellers took to thehills, glens and mountains in search of new aesthetic experiences and per-fect views. Urban looked at these aspects as symbolic parts of the culturalexperience and therefore educational to the spectator.

Even though Urban shot in locations across Great Britain, the earlyScottish series focused on those elements which maintained the countryas part of the periphery of the nation, both somewhere similar and yetother to the landscapes they thought of as home. Within the company’smapping of the country two aesthetic narratives appear; the picturesqueand peaceful landscape of the Lowlands and the wild and sublime land-scape of the Highlands, with the latter representing the “typically Scot-tish”.38 In some descriptions both components interact through differenttechnological apparatus:

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Passing through rock cuttings of exceeding grandeur, the train swoopsround curves innumerable, revealing scenes of beauty at every turn; nowawful and awe-inspiring; now restful; now romantic and beautiful; nowsublimely grand in its vast expanse.

Scenes of entrancing loveliness present themselves –of sea, river, loch,mountain, forest; of gigantic boulders, bleak moorland, peaceful Croftervillages, sumptuous lordly mansions, castles and ruins; the whole formingan ideal dream of Nature in her more picturesque forms.39

Like many of the other films, From the Kyle of Loch Alsh to the StromeFerry: A Highland Railway Run embeds the role of cinematic and trans-port technology within the traditional aesthetic language previously asso-ciated with direct contact with nature. Both the camera and train providethe possibility of new vantage points, whether through the curves andspeed of the rail line or the manner in which the camera can exploredetails in the landscape in a way not possible for the human eye or body.Here the technology and sublime and picturesque subject matter couldbe firmly interwoven constructing a narrative that oscillated between thepower of the technology and that of nature, where audiences could bothbe screened from direct contact and yet still experience components ofthe aesthetic states.

While transport technology certainly took on a central role within thecollection as a whole, not every film within the series relied on the expand-ing rail industry to represent the landscape. A few, like Rogie Fall andSalmon Fishing, mimic the tourist’s gaze more directly. In this film, theorder of pictures lists a series of shots jumping between long shots of thefalls and bridge and close-ups of the rushing water below. Here “sublimeviews” refers more closely to the subtle and not so subtle variations on thesame view. Point-of-view shots looking over the edge are paired with thereverse angle looking back up at the tourists peering down below. Thecatalogue argues that “the falls, as the torrent foams, rushes and poursinto the abyss overhung by wood-crowned walls of rock, will not be soonforgotten”.40 The ability to test out different positions and views per-fectly imitates the tone and directions given by the earlier tour guides,whether written by individuals or by the excursion industry. While theScottish landscape may not always be portrayed as completely hospitable,it was, according to these films and texts, open for service for each trav-eller who wished to explore. This narrative of leisure playground and aes-thetic escape disguised the truly constructed nature of the tourist industry.

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Just as Scott repopulated the space with imaginary characters and hybridevents, these films and guides embedded the eager tourist into the land-scape.

When these films did portray Scottish communities, they did so in oneor two ways; either as ethnographer, documenting a disappearing ruralculture, or as reporter, revealing the character of industrial life. Urban wasmuch more interested in the former than the latter. Like his other seriesfilmed across Great Britain’s colonies, Scotland became another placewaiting to be discovered. He often described his cameramen as explorerson important expeditions, capturing traditions and cultures that had neverbefore been seen. Bonnie Scotland featured films dedicated to the Crofterson the Isle of Lewis, the Cave Dwellers of Caithness, the Newhaven “fish-erfolk”, the tweed industry on the Isle of Harris and the granite quarriesnear Aberdeen. All five were introduced with the same rhetoric of “lit-tle known” or “almost forgotten”.41 Presented under the title “PovertyIsland”, the Urban catalogue described the crofters on Lewis as the mostdifficult to film because of the amount of effort it took to secure theirconsent. While the community is said to have a strong sense of “Gaelicpride”, they are also “unkempt, shoeless, their appearance betokens con-tinual strife with the elements”.42 Their homes fare just as poorly; “dark,dreary, insanitary, uncomfortable to a degree unknown further south”.43

Like the cave dwellers of Caithness, the crofters are filmed in sets of still-life tableaux, often hiding their faces from the camera. Bleak “living rep-resentatives”44 are juxtaposed with equally forlorn natural sites. For thecommunity in Caithness this takes the form of a wild goat in “a lonelyvigil… in his natural environment of mountain and clay”.45

The Urban catalogue engaged directly with the widely established yetoften paradoxical narrative of Scotland as existing on the periphery ofthe rest of Britain. The country provided an idealised other to contrastwith the industrial upheaval occurring in England, it existed as both an“essentialized category of race” and an “embodiment” of some of themost valued characteristics associated with British culture.46 As KennethMcNeil argues, this dialectic depended on a conflation between typol-ogy and topography where specific traits were understood as a product ofthe landscape in which they lived.47 McNeil uses the term “highlandism”to describe this set of “anthropological assumptions” held by those liv-ing outside of Scotland.48 In doing so he states that he wishes to “callattention both to the geographical determinism that underlies it and itscomparativism which reinforces an imperialist epistemology that assumes

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the universal condition of other ‘primitive’ mountain people and spacesset apart from normative, civil ‘lowland’ people and spaces”.49

While McNeil is particularly interested in the Highland warrior figure,both it and the “noble savage” motif had been central to much of thepopular travel literature produced across the late eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries, including by Diggle and Dorothy Wordsworth.50 Bothtropes were not only symptomatic of geographical determinism but werealso couched in philosophical arguments surrounding the so-called stagesof socio-economic development popular during the period. These stages“provided a means by which the history of civil society could be under-stood and simultaneously provided ideological support for such processof ‘Improvement’ as might be brought to bear in bringing a society toa higher stage of development”.51 Highland communities were regularlydescribed as emblematic of the early, primitive stages of this process, likea “contemporary ancestor”52 who was both in need of protecting andimproving.

Urban regularly engaged both tropes when exploring the relationshipbetween landscape and typology. He employed the Highland warriormotif when presenting military regalia and clan meetings, emphasisingthe integration of strength, pride and cultural tradition and relied on the“noble savage” when depicting supposedly isolated communities. Herethe rugged terrain of the Isle of Lewis and Caithness provided the perfectconditions in which to highlight the idealised poverty demonstrated bythe communities who were born there. Each custom and community wasa direct by-product of the landscape, whether based on the individual’sdesire to embrace or tame the wild. These tropes of the hardy, industriousand proud Highlander were juxtaposed with the urban lowland popula-tion providing an ongoing narrative comparing past and present.

Historic events and other “traditional” cultural practices are repre-sented in the same style—as recreated illustrations, detached from a senseof time or place. These include scenics depicting the pass at Killicrankieand Culloden. While the catalogue refers to the battles won and lost inboth spaces, the description of the shots are resolutely empty of any his-torical detail, standing as points of ghostly reflection. Stirling Bridge andthe Wallace Monument come to represent “the scene of Wallace’s rushfrom Abbey Crag above, to overwhelm the English army”.53 Both arepresented in passing long shots before a railway panorama of the placewhere the first Jacobite uprising took place. As the catalogue concedes;“It is a far cry from the memorised strife of the ancients to the present

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peace of Killicrankie’s beautiful pass”.54 Seen through the gaze of thetourist, these sites of cultural memory have a fleeting effect.

While many of the films from the series have disappeared, one from asubsequent year still exists, though not in an entirely complete form. Inthe Scottish Highlands (1908) focuses quite a lot of its time on a differentmanner of travel and touring. Rather than display particular cultural sitesor communities though, this film collects natural spaces which would havefallen within the parameters of the sublime, providing the viewer witha way of testing out different points of view from the comfort of thecinema.

Other tourists initially help the viewer make sense of the landscapes ondisplay, much like in the tradition of early landscape painting. In thesecases, the camera often remains perched at a distance while the figuresmove around in the landscape. This approach to framing complicates theway the spectator addresses the landscapes, mediating their level of atten-tion and identification in a manner that seems almost counter-intuitiveto the earlier scenics which addressed the spectator directly. These figuresappear in both shots where typically sublime natural objects are displayed,diffusing any sense of astonishment which could have had an effect on theviewer. In the first instance we are presented with a group of men stand-ing on the edge of a waterfall. The visceral power of the waterfall whichappeared in earlier “rocks and waves” films is mitigated by the distanceand sense of detachment of the viewer. Just before the cut the cameraseems to try to readjust the framing by panning slightly, decentring themen and revealing more of the scenery. This is so quick though that theviewer is not granted enough time to reassess the scene properly.

In the second case of sublime imagery we are presented with the frontof a boat in choppy seas. The first shot exhibits a strong sense of vis-ceral impact. This time the view is only partially obscured by a groupof passengers and the camera is moving along with the boat, tipping upand down through the water. This mode is juxtaposed with a long shotpresumably from the same boat. Rather than directed towards the wavesthough, this shot is pointed up towards a set of large cliffs passing inthe background. The pairing of these two views elicits a stark contrastof immersion and detachment. The second shot expands the view anddistances the spectator from the direct impact of the waves in the first.The calm and contemplative mode which is created in the second shot istherefore constructed out of its difference to the first, foregrounding theimportance of collecting different manners of address.

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The second half of the film shifts slightly to more tradition-ally picturesque and beautiful subject matter and seems to replicateWordsworth’s discussion on ways of approaching different sized natu-ral phenomena, displaying two different interesting examples of lochs.In both cases the horizon is the direct focus of the framing. The firstexample involves a sequence of shots looking from the side and front ofa boat along the side of a river moving into a large but completely calmloch. Even while the water remains completely still, offering reflections ofthe scene around it, the spectator can only quickly glimpse at the scenebecause of the brevity of each shot and the jerky sensation of the editingpattern which switches from looking to the side, to directly in front andthen quickly behind. The sequence ends with a long pan beginning with along shot directed at the centre of the loch and then slowly moving backtowards the centre of the boat where a group of tourists admire the view.

This sequence is attached to another set of three shots which are eachmuch longer. Rather than playing with different positions of address,these three, also taken from the side of a slowly moving boat, look upon amuch larger body of water. Here the eye is not directed towards the shorewhich is so far off that it lacks almost all detail. Instead, the eye movesthrough the centre line towards a beam of moonlight at the far end. Eachof the three shots presents the same framing, they appear to only differbased on the time they were taken, possibly a few minutes apart becauseof the slight variation in cloud patterns and boat position. The cameratakes the position of a spectator at ground level and moves through thespace by continuously shifting the frame, constructing its own propor-tional boundaries, even while the water clearly flows over the edge. Thisapproach seems to not only be interested in foregrounding the vantagepoint and role of observer55 but in actively reconstructing and extendingthe discourse surrounding nature appreciation, looking for the best wayto capture a view which, by its very nature, exceeds the boundaries set bythe frame.

In this film Scotland becomes synonymous with a romanticised High-land tableau, it becomes a testing ground for aesthetic and spiritual tran-scendence, devoid of actual inhabitants, cultural difference or history.Other tourists provide a performative framework for the viewer, theymodel the gaze and physical proximity dictated by the earlier guidebooks,sanitising the potentially overwhelming nature of each view. Travel tech-nologies like steamboats become equally naturalised. They seep into the

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landscapes rather than overwhelm the eye and come to represent a neces-sary part of any nature tour, becoming the linchpin between immersionand contemplation, subject and object.

Urban’s production catalogues and films are potent examples of col-lecting behaviour and methodology. The catalogues retained a complexbalance open to a wide variety of different combinations, offering pro-grammers the opportunity to address particular interests and effects. Andyet, while the collections of films became ever more vast in number, thecontent itself remained consistently tied to traditional historical and aes-thetic sites. As we have seen, many of these sites seemed to gesture toa particular liminal space between the past and present as if the emptylandscapes could provide direct encounters with events and people longdead. Even the natural spaces, documented for their aesthetic value, arecut off from the viewer by rows of tourists presented on screen peeringover the edge of rushing waterfalls or on-board steamboats gliding downthe lochs. In both cases the catalogues advertise each film as providinga direct experience, but rather than documenting something akin to thedifferent regions across the country, Urban provides an encyclopaedic col-lection of moving postcards, all adjusted to the gaze of the tourist.

These apparitions of the past were embedded in the larger rhetoric sur-rounding this particular form of travel collecting. Mirroring the literarytropes which had previously defined Scotland’s tourism identity, transportand representational technologies weaved disparate regions and commu-nities together while also effacing the physical and discursive patterns ofthe everyday life of the people who actually lived there. That is not to saythat the catalogues and films only employed a single form of spectatorship,both contemplative and immersive modes were used to emphasise the vis-ceral power of the technology to access the landscape as a view and as anembodied experience. The problem lies in the pattern and rhetoric inwhich both of these forms of experience were embedded. The collectionsoperated in a manner which maximised the traditional goals of travel andtherefore constructed a series of “staged performance[s]”56 which lackedthe nuance and reflexivity necessary to consider the role of tourist in anyother way. This form of occupying space, as McNeil writes, constructed a“unique zone of primitiveness within the nation itself, even as it paradox-ically became ever more accessible and convenient”.57 It created a systemof ordered movement, mapping and recording which provided a unifyingdiscourse surrounding concerns over the shifting nature of British culturalidentity.

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This complex overlap of colonialist and nationalist discourses gaveScotland a unique role in British imperialism. While Scott may have com-pared Highlanders pejoratively to the communities found in some of thecolonies, writing that “it must have been a matter of astonishment to thesubjects of the complicated and combined constitution of Great Britain,to find they were living at the next door to tribes”,58 people living withinthe core of England still felt a strong connection with those living on theperiphery. This shared past helped consolidate the nation while also dis-torting the “uneven power relations between cultures”.59 Of course, therhetoric surrounding race and typology altered even more substantiallywhen applied to the colonies, becoming deeply entrenched. In those casesit affirmed “the innate superior qualities of British colonizers”.60

Urban’s early production catalogues and scenics provide importantevidence of the manner in which methods of collecting construct andreassert powerful narratives about places, communities and travel. Theyallow us to briefly see behind the veil of tightly rehearsed traveloguesand guides and unpack the value structures and models of spectatorshipsembedded therein. While the nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesincluded travellers like Dorothy Wordsworth who were interested in per-forming within the landscape and consciously engaging in the day to dayrituals of the communities who lived there, most were not so inclined. Buteven when we include these methodological variations a theme persists.Each of these groups prioritised themselves and their role as traveller, con-structing their own identity structure through a narrative of either reflex-ive or critical juxtaposition. The idea of the periphery became the nexusat which home and away could intersect. This dialectic constructed anillusion of clarity and reclaimed knowledge which effaced all evidence ofthe uneven power dynamics embedded in leisure travel. Scotland becamea physical manifestation of internal exploration for the increasing numbersof middle class English tourists travelling north. The country remained arhetorical feature of the past while the communities who lived there facedthe industrial present head-on.

Notes1. See Hayden Lorimer and Katrin Lund, “A Collectable Topography:

Walking, Remembering and Recording Mountains,” in Ways of Walking,Ethnography and Practice on Foot, eds. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst(Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2008).

3 MAPPING, ORDERING AND RECORDING THE TOURIST’S LANDSCAPE 69

2. Lorimer and Lund, 186.3. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Verguns, “Introduction,” in Ways of Walking,

Ethnography and Practice on Foot, eds. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst(Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 15.

4. Lorimer and Lund, 190.5. Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), 81–84.6. Kenneth R. Olwig, “Performing on the Landscape Versus Doing Land-

scape: Perambulatory Practice, Sight and the Sense of Belonging,” in Waysof Walking, Ethnography and Practice on Foot, eds. Tim Ingold and Jo LeeVergunst (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 81.

7. Olwig, 85.8. Olwig, 85.9. Rachael Low, in the first volume of The History of the British Film (New

York: Routledge, 1997), states that the Warwick Trading Company wasproducing five to six hundred films a year by 1903 (p. 25), The CharlesUrban Trading Company, which opened the same year, was producingtwo hundred and fifty (p. 17), and the Hepworth Manufacturing Com-pany was making approximately two hundred films a year by the year 1906(p. 22).

10. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectatorand the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, eds.Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute,1989), 56.

11. Rachel Low, History of British Cinema: 1896–1906, vol. 1 (New York:Routledge, 1997), 44.

12. In Hepworth & Co.’s catalogue from 1903 the Index of Film Subjectsuses subject matter, format, and location in order to organise and classifyits collection of films. Films depicting natural domestic landscapes werecompiled under headings which isolated their formal qualities like thoselisted under “panoramas” and/or the natural phenomena depicted like“sea pictures” and “river scenery”. In the 1906 catalogue the heading“country scenes” was added along with the subheading “phantom rides”under “railway scenes”. The year also included the addition of multipleinternational locations. The Charles Urban Trading Company embeddedthe same combination of static imagery, panoramas, and frontal facingphantom rides under their series of collections. These collections weregenerally named after the location or phenomenon depicted like “Pic-turesque Switzerland”. Other one-off films were placed under “Miscella-neous”.

13. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema,trans. Tim Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2011), 4.

14. Gaudreault, 63.

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15. While the earliest of these films, single shot static scenics, are usually con-sidered part of the former category in contemporary criticism, describingthem as relying on distancing effects and traditional aesthetic notions offraming, even these vignette style films explored a variety of immersivetechniques which were associated with the discourse surrounding sublimespectatorship. See Samantha Wilson, “The Aesthetics of Astonishment andContemplation in Early British Scenic Filmmaking,” Early Popular VisualCulture 14, no. 3 (2016): 255–261.

16. This subgenre was quite popular with many of the British production com-panies at the turn of the century including Mitchell and Kenyon and theWarwick Trading Company, introduced most famously with Birt Acres’Rough Sea at Dover in 1895.

17. “Derby Castle,” The Isle of Man Times and General Advertiser, June 4,1895, 2.

18. “Maskelyne and Cooke’s,” The Era (London), April 18, 1896, 16.19. Germain Lacasse, “The Lecturer and the Attraction,” in The Cinema of

Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Stauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP,2006), 181.

20. Lacasse, 181.21. William Uricchio, “Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Non-Fiction

Film,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. DaanHertogs and Nico De Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmu-seum, 1997), 130.

22. See Samantha Wilson, “Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation inthe Sublime View: Nature Tours and Early Scenic Filmmaking in GreatBritain” (PhD Thesis, Concordia University, 2016).

23. Uricchio, 129.24. Uricchio, 130.25. “At the Palace,” Punch, August 6, 1898, 57.26. Hepworth’s 1904 The Waterfalls of Wales is an excellent example. The

camera begins by presenting a camp site off to one side of a rocky land-scape and then, beginning with a long shot from some distance, cutscloser and closer until the camera is right underneath the water lookingdirectly downwards. This series of images preform the same negotiationas the spectator on tour moving from a place of detached contemplationto complete immersion.

27. See Table 9.1 in John Caughie, “Depicting Scotland: Scotland in EarlyFilms,” in Early Cinema in Scotland, eds. John Caughie, Trevor Griffithsand Maria A. Vélez-Serna (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), 151.

28. Luke McKernan, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-fiction Film inBritain and America, 1897 –1925 (Exeter, Devon: University of ExeterPress, 2013), 66.

3 MAPPING, ORDERING AND RECORDING THE TOURIST’S LANDSCAPE 71

29. Luke McKernan, A Yank in Britain: The Lost Memoirs of Charles Urban,Film Pioneer, ed. Luke McKernan (Hasting: The Projections Box, 1999),54.

30. McKernan, 33.31. The Urbanora Catalogue (London: The Charles Urban Trading Company,

1906), 2.32. Urbanora, 2.33. Urbanora, 5.34. Urbanora, 21.35. Urban Catalogue (London: The Charles Urban Trading Company, 1905),

194.36. Urbanora, 21.37. Urbanora Catalogue (London: The Charles Urban Company, 1908), 7.38. Urbanora, 1906, 6.39. Urbanora, 1906, 11.40. Urbanora, 1906, 10.41. Urbanora, 1906, 9.42. Urbanora, 1906, 14.43. Urbanora, 1906, 16.44. Urbanora, 1906, 9.45. Urbanora, 1908, 145.46. Kenneth McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760–

1860 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2007), 120.47. McNeil, 92.48. McNeil, 86.49. McNeil, 86.50. This included early writers like James Boswell in The Journal of a Tour

to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996). SeeElizabeth Hagglund, Tourists and Travellers; Women’s Non-Fictional Writ-ing About Scotland, 1770–1830 (PhD Thesis: University of Birmingham,200), 111 as well as Hagglund, 143–146 for a discussion of DorothyWordsworth.

51. Charles Withers, “The Historical Creation of the Scottish Highlands,” inThe Manufacture of Scottish History, eds. Ian Donnachie and ChristopherWhatley (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), 147.

52. Withers, 147.53. Urbanora, 1906, 19.54. Urbanora, 1906, 19.55. Tom Gunning refers to this approach in actuality filmmaking produced

after 1906 as the “view aesthetic”. See Tom Gunning, “Before documen-tary: Early Nonfiction Films and the “View” Aesthetic,” in UnchartedTerritory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. Daan Hertogs and NicoDe Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 14–15,

72 S. WILSON

and Samantha Wilson, “The Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contempla-tion in the Early British Scenic Film”.

56. Olwig, 81.57. McNeil, 148–149.58. Walter Scott, “Review of the Culloden Papers,” Quarterly Review 14

(1816): 287–288.59. McNeil, 9.60. McNeil, 120.

References

Boswell, James. 1996. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson.Edinburgh: Canongate.

Caughie, John. 2018. Depicting Scotland: Scotland in Early Films. In Early Cin-ema in Scotland, eds. John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths and Maria A. Vélez-Serna, 147–165. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

1895. Derby Castle. The Isle of Man Times and General Advertiser, 4 June: 2.Gaudreault, André. 2011. Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cin-

ema, trans. Tim Barnard. Urbana: University of Illinois.Gunning, Tom. 1989. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and

the Avant-Garde. In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, eds. ThomasElsaesser and Adam Barker, 56–62. London: British Film Institute.

———. 1997. Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the “View”Aesthetic. In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. DaanHertogs and Nico De Klerk, 9–24. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Film-museum.

Hagglund, Elizabeth. 2000. Tourists and Travellers: Women’s Non-Fictional Writ-ing About Scotland, 1770– 1830. PhD Thesis: University of Birmingham.

1903. Hepworth Manufacturing Company Catalogue. London: Hepworth Man-ufacturing Company.

1906. Hepworth Manufacturing Company Catalogue. London: Hepworth Man-ufacturing Company.

Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.Ingold, Tim and Vergunst, Jo Lee. 2008. Introduction. In Ways of Walking,

Ethnography and Practice on Foot, eds. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst.Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing.

Lacasse, Germain. 2006. The Lecturer and the Attraction. In The Cinema ofAttractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Stauven, 181–192. Amsterdam: AmsterdamUP.

Lorimer, Hayden and Lund, Katrin. 2008. A Collectable Topography: Walking,Remembering and Recording Mountains. In Ways of Walking, Ethnography

3 MAPPING, ORDERING AND RECORDING THE TOURIST’S LANDSCAPE 73

and Practice on Foot, eds. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, 185–200. Hamp-shire: Ashgate Publishing.

Low, Rachel. 1997. History of British Cinema: 1896–1906, vol. 1. New York:Routledge.

1896. Maskelyne and Cooke’s. The Era (London), April 18: 16.McKernan, Luke. 2013. Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in

Britain and America, 1897–1925. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.Mcneil, Kenneth. 2007. Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760–

1860. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP.Olwig, Kenneth. 2008. Performing on the Landscape Versus Doing Landscape:

Perambulatory Practice, Sight and the Sense of Belonging. In Ways of Walk-ing, Ethnography and Practice on Foot, eds. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst,81–92. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing.

1898. At the Palace. Punch, August 6: 57.Scott, Walter. 1816. Review of the Culloden Papers. Quarterly Review 14: 283–

333.1905. The Urban Catalogue. London: The Charles Urban Trading Company.1908. The Urban Catalogue. London: The Charles Urban Trading Company.1909. The Urban Catalogue. London: The Charles Urban Trading Company.1906. The Urbanora Catalogue. London: The Charles Urban Trading Company.Urban, Charles. 1999. A Yank in Britain: The Lost Memoirs of Charles Urban,

Film Pioneer, ed. Luke McKernan. Hastings: The Projections Box.1909. Urbanora Supplement. London: The Charles Urban Trading Company.Uricchio, William. 1997. Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Non-Fiction

Film. In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. Daan Her-togs and Nico De Klerk, 119–131. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Film-museum.

Wilson, Samantha. 2016. Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation in theSublime View: Nature Tours and Early Scenic Filmmaking in Great Britain.PhD Thesis: Concordia University.

———. 2016. The Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation in EarlyBritish Scenic Filmmaking. Early Popular Visual Culture 14, no. 3: 255–261.

Withers, Charles. 1992. The Historical Creation of the Scottish Highlands. InThe Manufacture of Scottish History, eds. Ian Donnachie and ChristopherWhatley, 143–156. Edinburgh: Polygon.

Filmography

1908. In the Scottish Highlands. United Kingdom: Charles Urban Trading Com-pany.

1896. Rocky Shore. United Kingdom: R. W. Paul.1895. Rough Sea at Dover. United Kingdom: Birt Acres.

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1896. Rough Sea at Ramsgate. United Kingdom: R. W. Paul.1904. The Waterfalls of Wales. United Kingdom: Hepworth Manufacturing Com-

pany.

CHAPTER 4

Reclaiming Space and Fortifying Identity:Working Class Travel During the Glasgow Fair

Abstract This chapter explores the longstanding tradition of workingclass nature tourism and the complex relationship it had to the film indus-try at the turn of the century. While working class histories of leisuretravel have traditionally existed at the periphery of Scottish travel narra-tives, those patterns of movement and their accompanying tourist mark-ers had a direct impact on the construction of local spatial identities. Thischapter begins with a historical overview of the role that rambling andaccess to natural spaces played for working class communities in Scotlandbefore examining one particular area and period when leisure travel by theurban working class was most popular, the annual Glasgow Fair fortnight.The chapter considers how the integration of scenic films into the festivi-ties challenged and championed traditional excursion patterns maintainedby the travel industry and local working class tourists.

Keywords Work · Leisure · Glasgow Fair · Class · Access · Scenic films

While middle and upper class histories of leisure travel have dominatedmuch of the historical and contemporary travel narratives surroundingScotland, working class histories have traditionally existed only at thefringes. There are many possible reasons for this partial exclusion includ-ing considerable gaps within the surviving documentation, the complexity

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of regional development across urban and rural communities, and, per-haps most importantly, the conceptual overlap between the realms associ-ated with work and leisure. Modern definitions of tourism rely on a cleardifferentiation between work and leisure.1 While working class spatialnarratives would eventually be forced into this regulated pattern, histori-cally they remained far less fixed. As a consequence, any historical inquiryrelated to working class leisure practices must be articulated in relation toclass narratives about contested movement and labour. Early film can playa particularly interesting role in this regard. While, as we have seen, manyBritish production companies established relationships with the existingexcursion industry, a few companies were also interested in documentingemerging tourist trends in Scotland throughout the first two decades ofthe twentieth century. This push and pull between traditional patterns oftravel and the expanding number of tourists makes scenic and local topi-cal films important reflections of not only popular travel destinations butalso how working class audiences in particular imagined their own placewithin the cultural practice.

This chapter examines one particular area and period when leisuretravel by the urban working class was most popular: the annual GlasgowFair. It discusses how the integration of scenics and local topicals into thefestivities both inside and outside of the city replicated touristic patternschampioned traditionally by the middle class and was also able to capturenewer spatial practices. In order to accomplish this, the chapter exam-ines both the related film texts and their exhibition contexts in Glasgowand Rothesay. There are a number of challenges related to determiningthe nature of the latter. Prior to the establishment of permanent venues,moving pictures were circulated and displayed in a number of temporarylocations associated with fairgrounds, music halls and public halls by trav-elling showmen. While the technology was being showcased across “thelength and breadth of the country” over the course of the first decade,2

details related to the exhibition and circulation of scenics are highly frag-mented and therefore difficult to always establish. It is for that reasonthat this chapter relies on not only extra-textual sources like advertising,programme pamphlets and venue-related documents but also newspapercoverage and archival material associated with local nature and heritagegroups active during the period in order to map the scenic’s role in thelarger film and live entertainment infrastructure.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the scenic genre performedas a touristic marker circulating specific collecting models alongside other

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cultural material like maps, topographical literature and photography. Asdevices of speculation, each of these diverse objects and texts began recon-structing and renegotiating not only the patterns of access but also thevalues and narratives associated with different natural sites and spaces.When considered within the context of working class leisure patterns,they constructed models of legal and social precedents by emphasisingcompeting narratives about past spatial identities. Local and scenic filmsin particular provided an image of Scotland as open and accessible while,at the same time, organising and embedding contested spaces into thetransport industry’s already fixed excursion map.

Class and Nature Appreciation

Access to, and free movement across land within both natural and con-structed environments has a direct impact on the way individual andgroup identities are constructed and maintained over time. That move-ment often provides ways of destabilising conditioned narratives by test-ing our basic assumptions about the acquisition of knowledge and valuestructures through the imposition and proposition of new experientialvariables. In the absence of access “synthetic ‘sites of memory’” becomeentrenched in the collective narrative of a community.3 In The Afterlivesof Walter Scott Ann Rigney borrows the concept from Pierre Nora todescribe the rise of new institutions which acted as “repositories of mem-ory” in the nineteenth century “when the sense of being continuouslyconnected to a common past had been eroded by political upheavals,urbanisation, and the extension of the scale in which communities had tobe imagined”.4 As we have seen with regard to the upper and middle classBritish tourist, virtual forms of access, gesturing to discourses associatedwith the sublime and picturesque, helped reconstruct particular identitystructures linked to a shared idealised past. These, in turn, continued tostrengthen the pull of the commercial excursion map effacing many ofthe traditional patterns of access and narratives shared by working classcommunities.

These competing forms of spatial patterns were largely defined in rela-tion to conditioned class narratives about leisure and labour among boththe English and Scottish. While the former certainly made up a substantialportion of the leisure industry, regional tourists also contributed to thesignificant increase across Scotland during the nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries. Between 1809 and 1819 there were actually more tour

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guides about Scotland published in Scotland than in England or the restof Europe, with a total of twenty-four versus fifteen and fourteen.5 Justa decade prior, the New Lanark visitor’s register book listed over 2839tourists of which the majority were in fact Scottish, either there seeingthe cotton mills or the nearby Falls of Clyde.6 These numbers seem tosignal a growing interest by middle and upper class Scots in visiting theirown sites of heritage rather than travelling further afield.

Of course these groups were not the first to place value on travel tonatural landscapes, though they certainly dominated the narrative aroundits relationship to spatial identity. As Tom Stephenson has argued withregard to the creation of the Ramblers Association, there were manygroups who walked for pleasure well before this rise in middle classtourism.7 Prior to the formation of the industrial town, assumptions andmotivations about travel held by the rural labourer were complex andoften interrelated with the values associated with work. By the early nine-teenth century, the concepts of work and leisure became increasingly com-partmentalised by industrial labour practices, standardised assumptions oftime and the structure of urban spaces. Accessible green spaces were seenby many as essential to the continued well-being of the working class.As the journalist Archibald Prentice wrote, “thousands and tens of thou-sands whose avocations render fresh air and exercise an absolute necessityof life, avail themselves of the rights of footway through the meadowsand cornfields and parks of the immediate neighbourhood”.8 Many ofthese ramblers travelled in groups organised by their particular guilds orunions like the union of mechanics who set up leisure tours to countrysettings. In Mabel Tylecote’s The Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire andYorkshire before 1851 she describes excursions to Flamborough Head, theLake District, the Isle of Man and Harrogate all between the years of1847 and 1850.9 Other organisations, like local church groups, plannedtheir own walking tours to coincide with the factory holidays. Congre-gational minister and founder of the people’s holiday movement ThomasArthur Leonard, organised trips from his home town of Colne to theLake District and Pennines in the late 1890s.10 During the same period,various rambling clubs were being established in Scotland, including onein Greenock. In its inaugural year in 1904, the club led four excursionsincluding ones to Ben Lomond, Thankerton, Loch Long and the Kylesof Bute. It also created a mileage table for local walks in and around thecity. Any funds raised were used to build benches to attract more walkersto the area.11

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While new forms of travel may have been a central feature for mid-dle class tourism, enclosure laws would have a far more significant impactin regulating both everyday spatial patterns and leisure travel for ruralworking class communities in Scotland. As members of the upper andmiddle class were using their increasing amount of leisure time to getout into the countryside, members of the working classes were being sys-tematically relocated into urban areas. Between 1604 and 1916 a fifthof England’s total land was targeted by Enclosure bills, transforming tra-ditional boundaries and pushing agricultural labourers out of rural areasand into the towns for work.12 The shift from public to private land dras-tically increased the economic decline of the freeholding farmer and rurallabourer. This process of legal enclosure affected every area of Scotland,from the Borders and central belt up through the northeast and westHighlands. During this period the latter was marked by the “HighlandClearances” where vast amounts of the rural population were evicted fromthe land they had lived and worked on for generations.

Land use drastically shifted first towards the expansion of commercialsheep farming in the 1770s, and then, within the next hundred years,to deer forests and grouse moors with the rise of the so-called sportingestates favoured by the landed aristocracy.13 The latter peaked in 1912with a total of 3.5 million acres being used for game hunting.14 Prior tothis much of the country had still been held in common, as Stephensonnotes, “as late as 1847 there were some 37,000 acres of common pas-ture land in the Highlands”.15 Rural labourers and crofters were forcedto either migrate to the Lowlands or emigrate to the Americas and Aus-tralasia creating what Mairi Stewart and Fiona Watson describe as a “cat-aclysmic depopulation” of the central and northwest Highlands.16 Theywrite,

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the combined effects of sheepfarming and sport on the landscape of the Highlands was to create uplandlandscapes divided by substantial stone dykes and iron and wire fences,invariably crossing miles of high ground… As Smout so eloquently puts it,‘The grouse moor and deer forest between them changed a landscape ofuse, full of farmers working the hills at field and shieling, to a landscape ofdelight kept empty of people’.17

For Scottish labourers common land became increasingly inaccessibleas both a place to live and a place to visit. Enclosure laws provided one

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of the most significant reasons for the breakdown of traditional patternsof spatial identity across Scotland. Not only did they restrict access acrossthe Highlands, but they also altered the historical roles and routes of workand leisure among multiple regions in both the Highlands and Lowlands.Lord Cockburn the Lord Advocate of Scotland complained at the timethat when he was a boy “nearly the whole vicinity of Edinburgh was open.Beyond the Causeway it was always almost Highland. Corstophine Hill,Braid Hill, Craiglockart Hill, the Pentland Hills, the sea side from Leithto Queensferry, the river-side from Penicuik by Roslin and Hawthorndento Lasswade, the Valley of Habbie’s How and innumerable other placesnow closed, and fast closing, were all free…”. He went on to state thatcurrently “everything was favourable to the way-thief, and the poor werelaughed at. The public were gradually man-trapped off everything beyondthe high road”.18 The rights of locals and visitors were intrinsically linkedwhen it came to access to open natural spaces. Private landowners foundmore and more effective ways of obstructing traditional patterns of move-ment and forbidding locals and tourists from travelling, including usingboth legal and physical intimidation, closing local inns and preventing thetenants who did remain on their land from offering accommodation orfood to any travellers who did enter.

Travel technology would quickly fill the gaps left by the eradication oftraditional patterns of movement. By the mid-nineteenth century thesenew forms of transport began to make larger swathes of Scotland accessi-ble again, further adding to the tensions between tourist, local and prop-erty owner. These transport companies and links became the gatekeepers,not only organising the who, where and how but also which regions andcommunities profited from tourism. The steamboats were the first to aidin this shift, providing new, quicker alternatives to travel down the Clydetowards increasingly popular seaside and health resorts as well as new waysto travel across the lochs like Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine. Rail travelcame quickly on the heels of the steamboats. While, as Alastair Duriehas pointed out, railways did not provide access to new parts of Scot-land, they did “transform the scale and composition of tourism. Whereasthe coaches could carry dozens of passengers at a time, and the steam-boats a few hundred, the railways could move much greater numbers;and move them more quickly, with greater regularity and at less cost forthose prepared to accept the Spartan conditions of third-class travel”.19

Rail travel made completely new patterns of movement possible, adding

4 RECLAIMING SPACE AND FORTIFYING IDENTITY … 81

day excursions and commuting traffic to the popular week and weekendtravel established by the steamboat.

Amateur and professional naturalist groups also took advantage of thenew transport technology. In September of 1901 The British Associa-tion for the Advancement of Science, a group formed in 1831 as analternative to the Royal Society, held their yearly meeting in Glasgow.During the week the group offered a variety of excursions across Scot-land to both areas of geological relevance and historical interest. Everysingle one of these days out used aspects of the growing transport mapwith the majority using more than one. For example, when visiting LochKatrine and Loch Lomond the group travelled via train, coach and pad-dle boat to make the circuit in a day, something impossible to do halfa century before. Yet while much of each excursion was spent on differ-ent motorised and non-motorised forms of transportation, walking stillremained the predominant aim, especially in relation to observing differ-ent facets of the natural landscape. The other modes of spectatorship wererelegated to a place of mere convenience, unless, like in the case of thesteamboat, they provided a viewpoint that was inaccessible any other way.

While the British Association considered these forms of mechanisedtransport as tools of convenience, other clubs were not as accepting, argu-ing the merits of walking over the other forms of transportation thathad popped up in the nineteenth century. In one edition of the Scot-tish Mountaineering Club Journal, the President wrote, “It is the loveof nature in every form, and especially of the hills, a sense that, afterall sports and games have been tried and enjoyed, the most universal,most lasting, most healthful of all diversions, is that of walking in pureair and over beautiful country. Not being carted by train, or car, or tram,like so much merchandise; not confining ourselves to street, or road, orpath; but to roam over the untrammelled country…”.20 This attitude toeither the aesthetic, or, as the British Association indicates, epistemologi-cal, properties associated with walking as a mode of spectatorship, was, ashas been argued in previous chapters, symptomatic of the unease broughton by the numerous changes that had occurred in the late eighteenthand nineteenth centuries which had the shared consequence of forcing arenegotiation of shared space and landscapes.

When considered within the context of the tourism industry, this rene-gotiation often delivered conflicting results. While many communities did

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prosper off of the seasonal influx of tourists, individual ramblers contin-ued to have to contend with limited open spaces. Their traditional pat-terns of movement were reorganised on one side by the private plotsof land invested in sporting activities and on the other by the continu-ous development of new train lines which crisscrossed the landscape. In1866 The Times described how tourists were being barred from visitingmany key destinations noting that “In these secluded glens oppressionmay silently and ruthlessly crush the poacher and the poor harbourer ofthe poacher. The same submissive deference cannot surely be expectedfrom travellers”.21

But this tension between the hunting industry and the burgeoningtourism industry did not redirect all individual travel. Many were ableto use aspects of the new transport links without being confined to thetravel patterns promoted by the excursion industry. In Jean Adamson’sprivate memoirs she describes her childhood in the 1910s as being dividedbetween a tenement flat in the mining town of High Blantyre and hergrandparents’ farm near the Highland village of Ardentinny.22 Most ofher family would spend their summer and Easter holidays there, travel-ling through Glasgow up along the Clyde by steamer then ferry. Prior toher grandfather’s death in 1912 Jean would stay in Cuil Cottage near CuilBurn. Her grandfather Sandy began as a farm labourer and ploughmanbefore becoming a shepherd. Her own father would join the rest of thefamily on the first day of the Glasgow Fair and they would return to Blan-tyre at the end of the week. This yearly pilgrimage from city to country,Lowlands to Highlands, was not unique to the Blantyre family. It formeda pattern of travel for many families who had been divided geographicallyby the new industrial economy.

Whether a person or group identified as a hillwalker, nature enthusi-ast or a leisure traveller, documentation became increasingly importantin establishing and preserving patterns of movement and public right ofway. Surprisingly enclosure laws in England did provide for a roundaboutway of renegotiating movement and access for the middle classes. Whilemany public footpaths were being closed or altered, English common lawdictated that public use was in fact able to construct public right of way,meaning that walking was able to not only preserve older forms of travelbut dictate new ones.23 Of course in these cases, public use was predom-inantly verified by topographical documentation which strongly favouredthe upper and middle classes rather than either the rural communities

4 RECLAIMING SPACE AND FORTIFYING IDENTITY … 83

which had been depopulated or the travel patterns of the urban workingclasses.

Many of the media which did document or direct working class audi-ences remained embedded within these traditional topographical sources.Tour guides, illustrated maps, press material, photographs and travel filmsall provided ways of representing new spatial patterns at the turn of thetwentieth century, albeit through the lens of middle class tourism. DeanMacCannell defines these tourist markers through their associated touristattractions, describing them as part of an “empirical relationship betweena tourist, a sight and a marker”.24 Each marker represents a fundamen-tal step in the process of “sacralization” which defines objects, landscapesand experiences as attractions; a marker’s very existence provides evidenceof an attraction’s cultural significance.25

Media which were commonly linked to touristic markers not only iso-lated areas of importance but provided the itineraries which connectedthese cultural, historical and natural sights together. MacCannell writesthat “When they appear in itineraries, they have a moral claim on thetourist and, at the same time, then tend towards universality, incorporat-ing natural, social, historical and cultural domains in a single representa-tion made possible by the tour”.26 He goes on to state that these touritineraries “set up relationships between elements (as between neighbour-hoods and their cities) which cross the artificial boundaries between lev-els of social organisation, society and culture, and culture and nature”.27

While these forms of visual and literary documentation did not function aslegal precedents in the same way as traditional forms of mapping, they didperform as devices which constructed, formalised, reinforced, or under-mined particular routes, carving out accessible areas as well as showcasingthose that remained contested.

The Glasgow Fair

Most of the communities situated between Inverness and the regionof Dumfries and Galloway either participated or were impacted by thechanges associated with increased domestic and external tourism: “Somecommunities sent tourists – the large cities, mining communities and tex-tile towns; others received them, such as the seaside resorts and scenicinland communities; a third group acted as both source and destinationwith some leaving and others arriving”.28 Those travel narratives andtourist markers were at their most potent during the Glasgow Fair held

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annually in July. The fair is one of the oldest of its kind in the UnitedKingdom, dating from the late twelfth century. For the first several cen-turies the fair’s main purpose was to help support agriculture across Scot-land by offering a central point of trade for horses, cattle, and, in thelater years, short- and long-term labour. By the nineteenth century thatbegan to shift as the fair became more focused on entertainment andrelaxation, especially for the semi-skilled and unskilled industrial labour-ers who would be celebrating their holidays during the same period inJuly. As historian John Burnett notes, the “Glasgow Fair was the centralevent in the popular culture of the city”.29 At this point in the city’s his-tory three-quarters of the population were families whose “breadwinner”was employed as a labourer within the factories and shipyards across thecity.30 The annual fair acted as a barometer for the industrial health ofthe city and country. If the year had been good companies would givetheir employees more days holiday leave and families would have a littleextra pocket money to enjoy their much-needed break, if, on the otherhand, trade had been slow, especially during periods of political and mil-itary strife, like during the Boer War, numbers attending the fair and itsrelated leisure activities would suffer considerably.

During the early nineteenth century most of the fair’s activities wereheld in Glasgow Green in the east side of the city. The venue hosted anenormous variety of acts and amusements: “food, drink, strangers whowere strange both in dress and accent, ballad singers, fiddlers, pipers, jug-glers and strolling players”.31 Other activities were organised directly byvarious community groups and societies, like the gardeners’ walks whichbegan in the late eighteenth century.32 As Burnett argues, these firmlyidentified the holiday as something democratically held in common bythe people of Glasgow, leisure and entertainment by and for working andlower middle class communities.33

As the century wore on travel outside the city took on a more centralrole. Steamer journeys down the Clyde dominated early excursion traf-fic, with the phrase “doon the watter” emerging in 1855.34 The DundeeCourier described Glasgow as “deserted” during the fair with the majorityfinding themselves in Rothesay along the coast.35 In July 1841, 21, 980people participated in an excursion outside of the city,36 by the 1860s thatnumber had surpassed 100,000 and in 1875 it reached 160,000.37 Com-munities from across Scotland participated in mass leisure travel duringthe same annual period, but because of the sheer volume of people leav-ing Glasgow these were the groups who dominated the excursion traffic

4 RECLAIMING SPACE AND FORTIFYING IDENTITY … 85

and press narrative. With the increasing reach of the railway Glaswegianssoon began to visit a number of new locations starting in Scotland thenEngland and Ireland, and, by the turn of the century, across the Conti-nent and Americas. Working class patrons focused on the first three areas,choosing day and weekend excursions over week and month-long ones. In1899 The Glasgow Herald described the “exodus” as extending in everydirection writing that “indeed, there must be few places in Scotland whichhave not their quota, great or small, of Glasgow Fair holiday-makers”.38

The Herald ran a whole section of advertisements dedicated to thoseholiday-makers beginning on Fair Thursday when the train stations andthe steamer pier would flood with families trying to get a head start ontheir vacations. The fair excursion section included everything from smallrural B&Bs to month-long trips to the Caribbean. Council promoters,rail companies and large excursion operators, like Thomas Cook, all jos-tled with each other to attract hopeful tourists, either by slashing theirprices, offering a variety of tour destinations or using a diverse set offonts and headings in order to divert attention away from the other ads.The spread of those locations increased up until the First World War, withmore frequent trips to the Isles on offer.

The excursion map was densely marked with locations that couldsustain that competition along the western edge of the Highlands.While resort towns along the coast had had inexpensive fares since themid-nineteenth century (and had room and board available at equallycompetitive rates), other areas slowly became more competitive, offer-ing discounts to attract more working class families, like the CaledonianRailway did in 1894 when it provided return tickets for the price of asingle fare to Oban and Callander.39 Other areas debated whether theyshould be doing the opposite. The Moffat News and Annandale Her-ald wondered whether opening up their community to larger groups oftourists would have a negative effect; “Moffat, which has always beenthe resort of the cultured, refined and educated, will do well if in thesedays of democratic trend she bend all her energies to the keeping intactthe character she has hitherto maintained of a secluded, select and sylvanspot – character of which she must be justly proud”.40 Many other townsalso associated their “respectable” reputation with the groups of touriststhey attracted, like Girvan which had the distinction of attracting minis-ters.41 These forms of differentiation helped smaller communities com-pete with the areas and cities of Scotland that had longer histories oftourism.

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The Role of the Scenic and Local Topical

Touristic markers and their associated itineraries, such as early scen-ics, travel lectures and photographic displays, played their own part inthe Glasgow Fair festivities. Even with the staggering amount of excur-sion traffic leaving Glasgow every July there remained many options forthose unable to travel to virtually participate in the mass exodus. Thenineteenth-century fair had always relished views and experiences fromelsewhere. As Burnett argues, alongside the individual travelling showmenwere larger productions which provided the patrons of the fair a way toescape the confines of cityscape, including menageries and panoramas.42

By the turn of the next century, new forms of representational technol-ogy took hold, including moving picture shows. Many of the showmenwho brought these moving pictures to the fair circuit had previously beeninvolved in different facets of the Scottish fairground industry, includingGeorge Green and Robert Calder. Within a few years, permanent spacesbegan to pop up and by 1929 there were 127 cinemas in Glasgow.43

These moving-picture audiences were predominantly made up of mem-bers of the working class who could only afford to take day trips or did notleave the city at all during the holiday.44 By embedding the medium intothe tourism industry, the shows provided a way for these communities toexperience the technological and sociological trappings of modernity inmultiple new ways. Travelogues, scenics and many local topicals couchedthe astonishment associated with the technology within traditional land-scape aesthetics and heritage-based narratives, offering audiences an anti-dote to the increasingly urban and industrialised city at the turn of thecentury. These films were marketed as both aspirational as well as per-formative models. They became a key part in not only promoting thegrowing tourism industry but bolstering cultural identity across regionaland national boundaries, embedding new groups inside the largerrhetoric.

While individual scenic and local topical titles were rarely featured inprogrammes and advertisement after 1901, they did form an importantpart of an evening’s proceedings appearing in between comedies and dra-mas. Audiences didn’t seem to be just attracted to images of distant loca-tions either but were drawn to pictures featuring places far closer to home.In the early programmes that do feature a complete list there is evidenceof multiple films depicting both natural and historical sites across thecountry. For example, in an article for the Educational Film Bulletin,

4 RECLAIMING SPACE AND FORTIFYING IDENTITY … 87

T. A. Blake describes one of the first programmes to be shown at theSauchiehall street skating palace in Glasgow. It included both an Englishscenic depicting the Dover coast and a local topical depicting the depar-ture of the Columba steamboat from Rothesay.45 During the same periodveteran George Green presented views of Fingal’s Cave in a programmeexhibited in Vinegar Hill. Other cultural practices, like scenics dedicatedto the Highland Fling, were equally popular. One depiction presented byWilliam Walker played alongside local topicals of the Forth Bridge andBraemar Games.46 Walker also circulated and exhibited films depictinglocal landscapes as well more traditional “rock and waves” films, like onedocumenting “a storm at the South Breakwater”,47 and, at his company’sfirst exhibition in Glasgow, had multiple topicals depicting communityevents around the city.48 Moving picture shows could be found in manyof the most popular towns during the Fair as well. Rothesay had fivevenues, Greenock ten and Perth seven.49 These were particularly popularduring the holiday period. Rothesay had an estimated 12,000 audiencemembers attending its show on Fair Monday in 1913.50

Early scenics and local topicals created a particularly powerful over-lap between established itineraries and indexical representation for audi-ences. Katrin Lund argues that representational markers like these, aswell as more personal documents like lists, diaries and photographs, areall “different ways of fixing, framing, and objectifying movement overlandscape”.51 Film provided just this form of visual mapping, playingan important role in choreographing both the sites of attraction andtheir experiential parameters, providing a means of organising the overlapbetween public and personal cultural and spatial narratives.52 Both scenicsand topicals reinforced aspects of the industry narrative by repopulatingthe imaginary and real spaces that had been emptied by the Clearancesand virtually embedding new audiences into the cultural tradition.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, scenic films depictedleisure travel as a fully developed cultural practice. As we have seen in theprevious chapter, the itineraries and aesthetics of these multi-shot filmswere rooted within a traditional middle class travel narrative. Most high-lighted a series of “typical” Highland imagery: “wee scots lassie[s]” infull dress, winding mountain roads, “long hair Howetson [sic] sheep”,“druidical stones at callanish” and the “primitive methods” of particularhandcraft processes alongside collections of landscape imagery from theFalls of Clyde, Loch Lomond, Loch Katrine and Fingal’s Cave.53 This

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wide inventory of what companies like Urban defined as Highland cul-ture erased regional differences while also preserving a strictly detachedcontemplative space for the tourist. Leisure travel is depicted here as eitheran aesthetic pursuit, reserved for those already inclined or symbolic partsof the cultural experience and, therefore, educational to the working classspectator where any suggestion of their actual participation in the culturalpractice is removed.

While scenics largely replicated the tone and rhetoric of earlier travelguides and literature during the period, other genres and subgenres pro-vided narratives that more closely mirrored the mass leisure travel occur-ring during the summer holidays, especially in relation to Glasgow. Oneexample was the 1909 film Glasgow and the Clyde Coast (also known asHoliday Trip to the Clyde Coast of Scotland) which was sponsored by theLondon and North Western Railway. While the film remains very muchtied to the middle class travel experience, presenting train travel in a gen-teel manner, it is able to map the physical geography and popular rhetoricsurrounding day trippers going down the Clyde. The film opens insidethe luncheon car of the Caledonian train traveling northwards towardsGlasgow. The camera pans back and forth presenting numerous well-dressed couples being served dinner while watching the landscape skip by.When the busy train finally stops inside Glasgow Central Station the filmcuts to a series of locations immediately surrounding the station includingGeorge Square and Sauchiehall Street. As the film begins its way down theClyde by steamer we are introduced to the shipbuilding yards through theuse of a pan before moving further west to the more picturesque views ofDumbarton rock. Once it gets as far as Gourock pier the shot is reversedand we see families clambering aboard an already full deck. The steamercontinues on past Dunoon pausing inside Wemyss Bay station to watch apassing pipe band. It then makes its way to Rothesay where the pier andesplanade are busy with holiday-makers. In a similar manner to Glasgow,there are many activities awaiting families, including pony rides, boat rac-ing and theatre shows. The film ends in Millport with numerous imagesof children playing on the beach and rocks.

Overall Glasgow and the Clyde Coast presents an accurate visual mapof typical leisure patterns, fulfilling its function as a sponsored piece ofadvertisement for the tourism industry. It does so, though, from the samedistance as the scenic genre, like Urban’s In the Scottish Highlands dis-cussed in the previous chapter, catering towards the middle class touristrather than the emerging travelling working class. The film portrays an

4 RECLAIMING SPACE AND FORTIFYING IDENTITY … 89

important historical meeting point as middle and working class touristscome into contact with each other in both Glasgow and Rothesay beforereturning to their chosen activities. It acts as an important reminder ofthe manner in which different regional and class-based cultural activitieswere performed in parallel with each other.

Unlike the sponsored scenic, the local topical genre offered a slightlydifferent perspective on leisure travel. Often used as a device to attractaudiences by cinemas and showmen, this subgenre of the topical relied onthe surprising power of both local and personal of recognition rather thanany particular pictorial or landscape aesthetic. Tom Gunning describes the“cinema of locality” as “the amazement of a direct connection” embed-ded in the “viewing process”.54 The group of films’ primary function wasto provide the opportunity for audiences to see themselves and their com-munities on film, offering, as historian Stephen Bottomore describes it, “aconsiderable overlap between the people appearing in the film and thosewho watch it or are intended to watch it”.55 The importance of theselocal programmes for early 1900s audiences across Great Britain cannotbe overemphasised. Production companies such as Mitchell & Kenyonand Hepworth committed large amounts of their resources to this sub-genre.56 Other smaller companies cropped up throughout the first decadeincluding one Glaswegian topical company which advertised the subgen-re’s popularity by stating, “With local Topicals your pay box will be busy– always. The public like nothing better; show them local sports, pro-cessions, etc. The nearer home you bring them the greater is their inter-est”.57 Theatres placed that local recognition front and centre, like in thisadvertisement for a Calder production in Perth: “Grand local picture ofPullar’s Dye Works Employees. Have you been Cinematographed? Comeand See!”58 While many of the films documented local events and scenesof everyday life, and largely remained close to home, others, like the cel-ebration of Bannockburn’s sixth centennial, helped advertise individualregions across the country.59

This subgenre often had a dual purpose, not only did it allow audi-ence members to participate in the new technology60 but also helpedincrease the profile of the venues putting them on display. Cinema loca-tions often made appearances in local topicals whether in the backgroundor directly referred to through signage and advertisements. Sometimeseven the managers and their families would be filmed like the Palacein Rothesay’s James Gillespie and his daughter Jenny. The former mademany brief appearances in the topicals he commissioned in the 1910s and

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1920s while the latter appeared in the 1922 Lady Lauder in Rothesaywith a placard which read “Everybody goes to the Palace but me!”61

The increasing presence of cinema venues in local topicals mirrored thegrowing importance these sites and the cinematic experience played inthe performance of leisure travel. The overlap between traditional leisureitineraries and their active consumption on screen created its own con-tinuous cycle providing spectators and tourists with a sense of affirmationabout their chosen activities.

Local topicals were a fixture in tourist hotspots like Rothesay for justthis reason. In one example the Palace Picture House sponsored GeorgeGreen’s topical production company to make a film about holiday-makersentitled Holiday Scenes at Rothesay . This film combines attributes of thescenic genre with those of the local topical embracing the crowds drawnto the camera alongside detached landscape views. It opens with thearrival of the steamboat Columba into Rothesay Pier and a series of open-ing title cards describing the “full complement of Holiday-makers” onboard. Once all the people disembark a long pan presents the busy pierand pavilion dotted with trams and horse-drawn coaches. Unlike in theprevious film, the images of the beach which come next are chaotic innature with families eagerly competing for some space to relax and play.The middle of the film is made up of multiple panning shots of differ-ent tourist locations including Rothesay Castle, which, compared to theprevious few shots, is presented in a rather bucolic manner with only ahandful of tourists appearing near the entrance. As the film reaches itsend it returns to the Ladies’ Bathing Pond and family beach with groupsof women smiling and waving at the camera from the water. It concludesat the putting green situated along the city’s pier with an intertitle refer-ring to the famous Scottish golfer John Hutchison, stating that he “hadbetter look out”. Several families are presented trying their hand at thesport seemingly unaware that they are being captured on film.

Unlike the previous films which catered to audiences from furtherafield, Green’s topical was exhibited to audiences who were both localand regional tourists. Alongside those who travelled in mid-July fromGlasgow, the summer months involved numerous other holiday periodscelebrated by smaller communities which provided the opportunity forthose working in hospitality to visit other local communities.62 Touristsand locals would therefore perform dual roles with a great degree ofvariation between behaviour patterns, motivations and internal narratives.This overlap of different forms of the tourist gaze further complicates the

4 RECLAIMING SPACE AND FORTIFYING IDENTITY … 91

immediacy of the imagery in this film, blurring the boundaries betweenhome and away and work and play which usually define leisure travel.

Each of these genres (and subgenres), act as rather complex touristmarkers, not only validating the importance of certain sites but prescrib-ing appropriate behaviour through different forms of regional and class-based recognition. Leisure travel during the annual Glasgow Fair was sup-ported by each of these markers, promoting various aspects of regionaltourism whether the audience members were planning on travelling, cur-rently on tour or could only afford to attend the picture shows. Whileearly film did occasionally document new traditions associated with therise in working class tourism, it continued to place those locations andactivities within the confines of the previous excursion map. Where youcan go, how you recognise that space and what you did while there wasclosely organised by the travel industry promoting an image of Scotlandas open for exploration rather than one which was still largely in privatehands. This period of filmmaking prompts further questions about themanner in which the emergence of moving pictures expanded the roleand ideology of the tourist’s wandering gaze. These new audiences wereable to virtually embed themselves into places both near and far construct-ing complex tensions between immersive and detached forms of specta-torship. While it would take several more years before cinema began todocument larger experimentation and travel by working class tourists, thefirst decade offers perspective on the larger institutions at play in regulat-ing local spatial identities as well as the overlap between individual genresin relation to defining the realms of work and leisure.

The intersection of working class travel and tourist markers makes theGlasgow Fair an important barometer for judging the role of the tradi-tional excursion map in shaping emerging spatial patterns. These patternsreflected longstanding tensions over the relationship between land andproperty, and, the importance of free movement and access in determin-ing labour and leisure practices. With the rise of tourism from both acrossScotland and England, the right to roam underwent an even more com-plex and often paradoxical period of transition as the excursion industrycame head to head with property owners. But rather than expanding withthe increasing numbers of middle and working class tourists, operatorsprovided more ways of accessing those sites which had been tradition-ally popular, organising behaviour through tightly managed itineraries.Those itineraries relied on travel as an antidote to the stresses of dailyurban life and work constructing an even deeper divide between it and the

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realm of leisure. With these shifting assumptions about space and accesscame a transformation in the way working class people experienced natu-ral spaces, binding both to their own contested identities.

Notes1. John Urryand Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Nottingham: Sage,

2011), 4.2. Maria A. Vélez-Serna, “Travelling Bioscopes and Borrowed Spaces,” in

Early Cinema in Scotland, eds. John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths, and MariaA. Vélez-Serna (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), 27. For exampleRobert Calder and his crew of performers “paid regular visits to townsand villages in Shetland, Caithness and Argyll, while also running showsaround Fife and central Scotland” in the years following 1896 when heacquired a cinematograph. See Vélez-Serna, 22 for a further discussion ofearly Scottish entertainment circuits and venues.

3. Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford:Oxford UP 2012), 6–7.

4. Rigney, 7.5. Alastair Durie, Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scotland,

1780–1939 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003), 21.6. Durie, 27.7. Tom Stephenson, Forbidden Land, ed. Ann Holt (Manchester: Manchester

UP, 1989), 57.8. Archibald Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manch-

ester (London and Manchester, 1851), 289 cited in Stephenson, 59.9. Mabel Tylecote, The Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire

Before 1851 (Manchester, 1975).10. Stephenson, 69.11. Ramblers’ Club Minutes 1904–1905 (Greenock: Temperance Institute,

December 13, 1905).12. “Enclosing the Land.” UK Parliament. https://www.parliament.uk/

about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/landscape/overview/enclosingland/. Accessed June 21, 2019.

13. Mairi Stewart and Fiona Watson, “Land, the Landscape and People in theNineteenth Century,” in A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800 to1900, eds. Trevor Griffiths and Graeme Morton (Edinburgh: EdinburghUP, 2010), 40–41.

14. Stewart and Watson, 44.15. Stephenson, 118.16. Stewart and Watson, 40.

4 RECLAIMING SPACE AND FORTIFYING IDENTITY … 93

17. Steward and Watson, 40 quoting Charles Smout, Nature Contested: Envi-ronmental History in Scotland and Northern England Since 1600 (Edin-burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 133.

18. H. Cockburn, Journal of Henry Cockburn: Being a Continuation of theMemorials of His Time, 1831–1854 (Edinburgh, 1874), 104–105 cited inStephenson, 120.

19. Durie, 59.20. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal 1, no. 1 (December 12, 1889) cited

in R. J. Morris, “New Spaces for Scotland, 1800 to 1900,” in A History ofEveryday Life in Scotland, 1800 to 1900, eds. Trevor Griffiths and GraemeMorton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 242–243.

21. Cited in Durie, 122.22. Jean Adamson, From Blantyre to Barnacabber, an Edwardian Childhood in

the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland, ed. Alex Adamson (Linlithgow,2015).

23. Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Originsand Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1993), 67.

24. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berke-ley: U of California, 1999), 41.

25. MacCannell, 45.26. MacCannell, 45.27. MacCannell, 51.28. Durie, 63.29. John Burnett, “Small Showmen and Large Firms: The Development of

Glasgow Fair in the Nineteenth Century,” Review of Scottish Culture 17(2005): 72.

30. Burnett, 72.31. Burnett, 73.32. Burnett, 73.33. Burnett, 73, 76.34. Burnett, 77.35. “Glasgow Fair, An Hour with the Show People,” The Dundee Courier &

Angus (July 23, 1896), 7.36. Durie, 61.37. Burnett, 78.38. Glasgow Herald (July 17, 1899).39. Glasgow Herald (July 12, 1894).40. The Moffat News and Annadake Herald (July 16, 1915) cited in Durie,

187.41. Burnett, 85.42. Burnett, 75.

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43. John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths, and Maria A. Vélez-Serna, “Introduc-tion,” in Early Cinema in Scotland, eds. John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths,and Maria A. Vélez-Serna (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), 3.

44. Due, in part, to the wide variety of public and private venues and contextswhich incorporated moving pictures, outside of the Glasgow Fair whenmost middle and upper class families would travel outside of the city,audiences in Scotland tended to vary quite widely across socio-economiclines, see Vélez-Serna, 22–24.

45. T. A. Blake, “The Cinematograph Comes to Scotland 1896–1902,” Edu-cational Film Bulletin 23 (1956): 13–14.

46. William Walker, Film Programme, Robello Collection (Aberdeen: ScottishScreen Archive, 1897).

47. Robert Smith describes several programmes put on by Walker right beforethe turn of the century in his article “Hidden in the Archives,” EveningExpress (July 11, 1985).

48. Glasgow Herald (December 29, 1900), 4.49. John Caughie et al. Map of Venues, Early Cinema of Scotland Research

Project, accessed May 10, 2017, http://earlycinema.gla.ac.uk/venues-map/.

50. Rothesay Express (August 5, 1913): 2f cited in Burnett, 83.51. Katrin Lund, “Making Mountains, Producing Narratives, or: ‘One Day

Some Poor Sod Will Write Their PhD on This’,” Anthropology Matters 8,no 2 (2006): 1.

52. Urry and Larsen, 191.53. Urban Catalogue (London: Charles Urban Trading Company, 1908).54. Tom Gunning, “Pictures of Crowd Splendour: The Mitchell and Kenyon

Factory Gate Films,” in The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: EdwardianBritain on Film, eds. Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple, and Patrick Russell(London: British Film Institute, 2004), 52.

55. Stephen Bottomore, “From the Factory Gate to the ‘Home Talent’Drama: An International Overview of Local Films in the Silent Era,” inThe Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, eds.Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple, and Patrick Russell (London: BritishFilm Institute, 2004), 33.

56. Vanessa Toulmin, Electric Edwardians, the Story of the Mitchell and KenyonCollection (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 35.

57. “Topical Productions,” Robello Collection (Glasgow: Scottish ScreenArchive).

58. Robert Calder, “Perth City Hall,” Miscellaneous Cinema Records (Perth:Scottish Screen Archive).

59. Stirling Observer (July 4, 1914).60. John Caughie and Janet McBain, “Local Films for Local People: ‘Have

You Been Cinematographed Yet?’” in Early Cinema in Scotland, eds. John

4 RECLAIMING SPACE AND FORTIFYING IDENTITY … 95

Caughie, Trevor Griffiths, and Maria A. Vélez-Serna (Edinburgh: Edin-burgh UP, 2018), 132.

61. Caughie and McBain, 136.62. Stirling Observer (June 20, 1914).

References

Adamson, Jean. 2015. From Blantyre to Barnacabber, an Edwardian Childhoodin the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland, ed. Alex Adamson. Linlithgow(unpublished memoir).

Blake, T. A. 1956. The Cinematograph Comes to Scotland 1896–1902. Educa-tional Film Bulletin 23: 13–14.

Bottomore, Stephen. 2004. From the Factory Gate to the ‘Home Talent’ Drama:An International Overview of Local Films in the Silent Era. In The Lost Worldof Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, eds. Vanessa Toulmin,Simon Popple, and Patrick Russell, 33–48. London: British Film Institute.

Burnett, John. 2005. Small Showmen and Large Firms: The Development ofGlasgow Fair in the Nineteenth Century. Review of Scottish Culture 17: 72–89.

Calder, Robert. Perth City Hall. Miscellaneous Cinema Records. Perth,GB2120/SSA/5/7/1, National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive.

Caughie, John, and Janet McBain. 2018. Local Films for Local People: ‘HaveYou Been Cinematographed Yet?’ In Early Cinema in Scotland, eds. JohnCaughie, Trevor Griffiths, and Maria A. Vélez-Serna, 130–146. Edinburgh:Edinburgh UP.

Caughie, John, Trevor Griffiths, and Maria A. Vélez-Serna. 2018. Introduction.In Early Cinema in Scotland, eds. John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths, and MariaA. Vélez-Serna, 1–13. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

Caughie, John, Trevor Griffiths, Maria Vélez -Serna, Julia Bohlmann, and Caro-line Merz. 2015. Map of Venues. Early Cinema of Scotland Research Project.http://earlycinema.gla.ac.uk/venues-map/. Accessed May 10, 2017.

Cockburn, H. 1874. Journal of Henry Cockburn: Being a Continuation of theMemorials of His Time, 1831–1854. Edinburgh.

Durie, Alastair J. 2003. Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scot-land, 1780–1939. East Linton: Tuckwell.

Enclosing the Land.UK Parliament. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/landscape/overview/enclosingland/. Accessed June 21, 2019.

1894. Glasgow Herald, July 12.1896. Glasgow Fair, an Hour with the Show People. The Dundee Courier &

Angus, July 23.

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1899. Glasgow Herald, July 17.1900. Glasgow Herald, December 29.Griffiths, Trevor, and Graeme Morton, eds. 2010. A History of Everyday Life in

Scotland, 1800 to 1900. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.Gunning, Tom. 2004. Pictures of Crowd Splendour: The Mitchell and Kenyon

Factory Gate Films. In The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: EdwardianBritain on Film, eds. Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple, and Patrick Russell,49–58. London: British Film Institute.

1908. In the Scottish Highlands. In Urban Catalogue. London: The CharlesUrban Trading Company.

1914. June Holiday. Stirling Observer, June 20.Lund, Katrin. 2006. Making Mountains, Producing Narratives, or: ‘One Day

Some Poor Sod Will Write Their PhD on This.’ Anthropology Matters 8, no.2.

MacCannell, Dean. 1999. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berke-ley: U of California.

McNeil, Kenneth. 2007. Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands 1760–1860. Columbus: Ohio State UP.

Memorandum re Loch Lomond Steamers. Records of British Railways Board.BR/HRP/S/34.

1915. The Moffat News and Annadake Herald, July 16.Prentice, Archibald. 1851. Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of

Manchester. London and Manchester.1905. Ramblers’ Club Minutes 1904–1905. Greenock: Temperance Institute, CS8

Inverclyde Council Archives.Rigney, Ann. 2012. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford:

Oxford UP.1913. Rothesay Express, August 5.1889. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal 1, no. 1 (December 12).Smith, Robert. 1985. Hidden in the Archives. Evening Express, July 11.Smout, Charles. 2000. Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and

Northern England Since 1600. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.1900. St. Andrew’s Hall. Glasgow Herald, December 29.Stephenson, Tom. 1989. Forbidden Land, ed. Ann Holt. Manchester: Manch-

ester UP.Stewart, Mairi, and Fiona Watson. 2010. Land, the Landscape and People in the

Nineteenth Century. In A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800 to 1900,eds. Trevor Griffiths and Graeme Morton. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

1914. Stirling Observer, July 4.1914. Stirling Observer, June 20.Topical Productions. Robello Collection. Glasgow, GB2120/SSA/5/2/11,

National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive.

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Toulmin, Vanessa. 2006. Electric Edwardians, the Story of the Mitchell and KenyonCollection. London: British Film Institute.

Tylecote, Mabel, 1957. The Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and YorkshireBefore 1851. Manchester.

Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Nottingham: Sage.Vélez-Serna, Maria A. 2018. Travelling Bioscopes and Borrowed Spaces. In Early

Cinema in Scotland, eds. John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths, and Maria A. Vélez-Serna, 14–32. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

Walker, William. 1897. Film Programme. Robello Collection. Aberdeen,GB2120/SSA/5/2/2, National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive.

Wallace, Anne D. 1993. Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Originsand Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Wilson, Samantha. 2017. A Trip ‘Doon the Watter’ During the Glasgow Fair:Working Class Leisure Patterns and the Role of the Scenic Film at the Turn ofthe Century. International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen 10: 92–110.

Filmography

1909. Glasgow and the Clyde Coast. United Kingdom: Kineto Co.1921–1922c. Holiday Scenes at Rothesay. United Kingdom: Green’s Topical Pro-

ductions.

CHAPTER 5

I Never LeaveHomeWithout It: AmateurFilmmaking in the Interwar Period

Abstract This chapter shifts from the public to the private sphere andconsiders the importance of the rise of the amateur holiday film withinthe context of class, collection and nature appreciation during the inter-war period. Amateur films are a rich and often untapped source of his-torical evidence. They can reveal the degree to which individuals hadinternalised the tourist industry’s primary claims about the importanceof regional travel in relation to cultural identity. The chapter considerstwo amateur filmmakers: David C. Bowser and Frances H. Montgomery.While the surviving films from both collections provide evidence of theimpact the larger scenic and travelogue industry had on the constructionof leisure activities and the importance of documenting one’s spatial pat-terns and identity, the films also present competing aesthetic and thematicnarratives, especially in relation to the concepts of home and away.

Keywords Holiday films · Scotland · Amateur filmmakers · Scenicgenre · Travel and tourism

The interwar period brought with it the emergence of a new kind ofscenic filmmaking which signalled a return to experimentation with spaceand landscape, something that had been previously neglected and dis-torted by the leisure industry in Scotland. With the introduction oflightweight and portable cine cameras by companies like Kodak in the

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early 1920s came the rise of amateur filmmaking across Great Britain.1

Largely dominated by wealthier men, these cine enthusiasts were keen totry their hand at creating their own moving pictures. Over the next twodecades, a range of new equipment was developed for the home marketwhich would allow individuals to not only shoot their own material butdisplay their work to their families in the household.2 This range of tech-nology opened up opportunities for creative exploration “untrammelledby worries about censorship or box office success”3 making the homemovie a compelling example of the increasing centrality of the camera inthe formation of personal spatial identities.

This chapter compares the work of two amateur filmmakers, DavidC. Bowser and Frances H. Montgomery, and examines how both col-lections utilised natural spaces to articulate their own vision of family.The filmmakers were chosen based on a number of factors including therange and size of their respective collections, the manner in which eachreflected, and sometimes challenged, other amateur work of the period,and the overall composition (both collections explore regional holidaytravel as well as leisure activities taking place nearer to home). The collec-tions were donated to the National Library of Scotland’s Moving ImageArchive (formerly known as the Scottish Screen Archive) by family mem-bers and therefore much of the following chapter relies on close readingsof the films themselves.

Other information about the filmmakers is directly related to theirproperty and/or professional lives. Quite a bit of material related to theformer is available for Bowser who took over the Argaty Estate in Dounewith his wife Maysie Bowser (née Henderson) in the mid-1920s from hismother-in-law.4 The estate itself, known as the King’s Lundies, dates tothe medieval period and is the subject of a number of Bowser’s amateurfilms. Bowser received a CBE in 1926 “for services rendered in the Liq-uidation Department of the Ministry of Munitions”5 and went on to runthe estate until it was passed down to his children. In contrast, archivaldocuments associated with Montgomery are closely tied to her role asBurgh Councillor in St. Andrews. Elected at the end of the 1920s, Mont-gomery performed a variety of roles in her community and her films notonly present key figures and events but also reflect the development of thewomen’s rights movement in the area.6 Considered together, these col-lections perform as personal archives which are constantly re-evaluatingthe value of recording, collecting and organising experience and appreci-ation in their respective communities.

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The Home Movie

The “home movie” has been a neglected feature within the history offilm until quite recently when theorists and historians like Heather Nor-ris Nicholson, Patricia Zimmerman, Ian Craven and Mathew Kerry haveargued for the potential of early amateur work to provide importantinsights into not only the formal and cultural development of cinema butalso the individual and collective identities of those in front of and behindthe camera.7 There are many reasons why this material may have beenoverlooked and “dismissed” by previous historians.8 Regional archiveshold quite a bit of amateur footage which typically presents a series ofqualities that, as Nicholson argues, “may cause derision in some quarters”including “predictable, clichéd and domestic subject matter that may alsocombine with minimal skills in editing and camera handing”.9 The scenicgenre has suffered from a similar level of critical neglect for many of thesame reasons. But it is arguably exactly these qualities and level of scalewhich makes amateur (and of course scenic) filmmaking a source of com-pelling evidence about the manner in which travel, landscape and repre-sentational technology broke down and built up personal and collectiveidentities in the early and mid-twentieth century. These “micro geogra-phies”10 constructed “homespun visual narratives woven out of numer-ous, fairly unassuming stories that people have told about themselves”11

and the spaces that they moved through.In a similar manner to early travel writing, these amateur films present

endless examples of experimenting and visualising space as well as engag-ing with the cinematic process. While the film industry and manufacturerscertainly played a role in articulating the manner in which the cine camerashould be used within the home through their advertisements and tradepress,12 each family utilised the technology in their own particular waydepending on how they wanted to represent their lives and capture mem-ories for later consumption. New channels of discourse began to emergeamong amateur filmmakers where debates about subject matter, framingand manners of display were constantly being revisited.13 All of these dis-cussions, whether made in public or private forums, were part of an intri-cate process of memory-making where the holiday film played a centralrole.

The films made while on holiday became an incredibly popular sub-genre for the amateur filmmaker.14 These films provided a number ofimportant elements for a potential director including a reason to take

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advantage of natural light while shooting outdoors and the potentialfor novelty and spectacle which would interest families and friends backhome.15 With the end of the First World War upper and middle classfamilies began to be able to access a range of spaces both at home andabroad once again. As Alastair Durie argues, the interwar period was oneof “renewal” where “steamer and railway services were mostly restored totheir pre-war levels”.16 During the years just following the war, there were“record numbers” of people visiting traditional Scottish tourist towns inthe summer seasons, especially once the Glasgow Fair hit.17 “Middle-and upper-class families had returned in strength to the Scottish resortsto which their parents had taken them before the War and indeed duringit”.18 Leisure travel re-emerged as an essential and “deep-rooted” partin the lives of both groups.19 What happened while on holiday largelydid not change from the patterns seen prior to the war but the spacesbeing accessed and the manner in which these spaces were addressed andcollected did. Capturing what one did while on tour continued to bean essential feature of the experience and thus the cine camera took ona larger and larger role as the price and practicality of the technologiesimproved.

With regard to England, the holiday film played a particularly impor-tant role in reasserting the pastoral and rural as central qualities of“Englishness”.20 As M. A. Lovell Burgess argued “the amateur cinemovement is helping English people to love England; or perhaps it wouldbe more accurate to say that the movement is becoming a mediumthrough which English men and women can express their love of Eng-land”.21 The earliest holiday films largely mirrored the scenic and localtopicals produced by professional companies and the excursion indus-try, except with less obvious signs of forethought and narrative struc-ture. These films were described as “successors” to the family “snapshotalbum”,22 documenting the process for family and friends to watch andrewatch back home.

By the 1930s the holiday film had its own standardised visual style.Specialised publications like Amateur Cine World described the typicalfilm as a “mélange” of landscapes and family portraits which, in mostcases, were “innocent in form and woefully lacking in continuity”.23 Butwhile the ACW was critical of many examples of the subgenre, they con-tinuously returned to the role of the holiday film in the amateur’s col-lection. In its first issue the journal underlined the importance of the

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film in articles like Rambling with a Cine-Camera.24 Even at the out-set the ACW was not so much interested in debating what the holidayfilm was, but rather how amateurs could achieve a particularly interestingfilm by capturing the perfect view and telling their audience a compellingstory about it.25 With regard to the former, the ACW often discussed theimportance of how different views and landscapes should be approached.These were drawn directly from the earlier debates surrounding the pic-turesque and sublime. When describing his approach to the “majestic”Cornish coast, one author wrote

Some of the views were quite breath-taking but only because one sawthem as a whole. In panning one splits up the scene and doles it out in aprogressive dribble, as it were, thus robbing it of much of its majesty. Thepanoramic view owes its effect to the general impression it creates of theobserver. Were he to analyse it, in nine cases out of ten he would find thatthe component parts are not at all striking— it is their cumulative effectwhich counts.26

What is assumed here is that the ACW ’s readership is already reasonablywell versed in the underlining argument; the manner in which a land-scape or view is accessed drastically changes the cultural, aesthetic andepistemological nature of the experience. The holiday film allowed theamateur filmmaker to do something which they had never been able todo before—replicate and share their own personal approach to landscapein a seemingly unmediated way. Whether the filmmaker chose to followpre-existing frameworks or experiment with a series of different models ofspectatorship, each choice was an expression of values, of a specific spatialidentity, whether in relation to family, class or nation.

The holiday films which received acclaim in the journal were those thatembedded their images in creative thru lines and developed a style whichwas adhered to throughout the whole work. One scenic, produced afterthe Second World War, Paradise Cove, was chosen as one of the jour-nal’s top ten films of the year. While the film featured many of the sameseaside activities as other typical holiday films, it used a level of abstrac-tion through framing and transitions not seen by the editors before in thesubgenre. They wrote that the

producer has tried to picture not actuality but the spirit of holiday-makingseen through the rose-tinted glasses of memory, and has borne in mind

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that memory stores up the isolated incident, the picture of how such-and-such looked on such-and-such day and the happy trivialities that nourishthe imagination long after the bolder outlines of the picture have faded.27

While Paradise Cove may have displayed a distinctive approach to weavingits views together, all amateur holiday films, whether they were producedduring the interwar period or just after, played with memory and land-scape, either consciously or not. Often the illusion of spontaneity hid thecomplex processes and wider discourses which all structured the sequenceof moving images produced on screen. Like the family album, the primaryaim of each holiday film was to construct and preserve a particular idealand sentiment that could be returned to again and again. Another authorfor the ACW , Tony Rose, referred to memory as a “useful hold-all forill-assorted visuals” that could be used as a way to “excuse unorthodoxcontinuity”.28 In both cases, the sense of continuity valued by the editorsof ACW reflects something deeper than a stylistic choice. It expresses therole holiday films, and indeed scenic and local topicals in general, playedin binding ideals of family to a history of nature appreciation which itselfaimed to preserve identity formations in the face of unrelenting changeand uncertainty. Here memory becomes the symbol of both form andfunction. As Nicholson argues “These idealised versions of rurality per-haps offered escapist reassurance and a sense of continuity with an olderworld order still unshaken… Repeatedly, amateur film’s often comfort-able memory-shaping and portrayals of families at leisure intermesh recre-ational and lifestyle trends with the intricacies of unevenly paced regionalchange”.29

The Scottish Holiday Film

The amateur holiday films made in Scotland which still survive offer var-ious examples of the same commitment to idealised families and pic-turesque and/or sublime landscape imagery. But while many of the samethemes persist on both sides of the border, Scottish holiday films displayparticular variations which attempt to counteract the images being cir-culated by the excursion industry. In many ways, these films were symp-tomatic of the acute sense of unease and “crisis of identity”30 in rela-tion to the changes that were occurring both inside and outside of thecountry during the interwar period. As Lorimer puts it, “During the

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inter-war period, a region characterised by place-imagery which drew onestablished ideas of marginality, peripherality and perceived dislocationfrom civilised centre of the British state, was swiftly brought to the fore-front of economic, social and cultural discussion”.31 Creeping industri-alisation and large scale “improvement” plans set to occur across ruralcommunities were drastically changing the landscapes which had previ-ously stood at the centre of the Scottish shared identity.32 These changesto both the character and routines of rural life were continuing to openup a series of debates across the country about the nature of tradition andmodernity on the Scottish psyche. Amateur filmmakers largely appearedto become more resolute in capturing and circulating typical Highlandlandscapes and pastoral activities during this period, doubling down onprevious commitments to marginality and a kind of geographical deter-minism which had been central to the perceived national identity prior tothe First World War. But within that impulse to collect and preserve whatseemed to be slowly slipping away, filmmakers were not just replicatingprevious Scottish scenics. When the amateur stepped behind the camerathey often developed their own approach to these landscapes seeminglydetermined to explore the manner in which these spaces imbued theirdaily life with particular meaning.

Both Bowser and Montgomery’s collections provide ample evidence ofthe variety of experimentation with regard to space and place occurringduring the period. While they may both display sustained markers of theirmiddle and upper class backgrounds, they also present diverging imagesof family life during the interwar period. Bowser captured his family ontheir own, detaching each area of travel from its local community. As alocal councillor, Montgomery chose instead to embed her family in therhythms of the town and landscape.

In a similar manner to the professional scenic and local topical, collect-ing motifs played a central and defining role in how these two filmmak-ers understood their position behind the camera. As we will see though,both filmmakers were not just collecting experiences but experimentingwith how the camera could help them renegotiate those experiences, nar-ratives and landscapes. While what they did on holiday largely didn’t vary,the spaces and stylistic choices did. Here the camera became further andfurther interlinked with the pastoral, naturalising this aspect of modernityat the same time that it made quite substantial changes to the rhythmsof everyday life.33 As Nicholson suggests, the cine camera “symbolisedoutlook as well as affluence” and became akin to another travel souvenir

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which helped the amateur differentiate themselves as spectator and “im-age collector”.34

David Charles Bowser produced a number of amateur films in theinterwar period. The vast majority documented his family during periodsof leisure, whether at home on the Argaty estate or across parts of Scot-land and England, with a particular fondness for Nairn in the Highlands.When interpreted as a collection these films develop multiple differentthru lines about the exploratory nature of the tourist gaze. In fact, look-ing, as both a way of defining and testing boundaries between home andaway, becomes the central narrative that organises this archive of familymemories.

Bowser seems at the outset to represent the typical amateur filmmakerin the 1920s. Upper class men formed the vast majority of the groupduring the period when equipment remained very expensive. Every oneof Bowser’s films is embedded with signs of class, from the Rolls Roycein the foreground to the cricket and horse riding lessons for his chil-dren, images of affluence sit side by side with more classic holiday sceneson the beach, picnic or at the fair. But each one of these films offersmore than an affirmation of status and stability. Bowser was interested inthe manner in which the cine camera could reveal something about theworld around him. His formal approach to different subjects makes thisparticularly apparent. While Bowser experiments with a number of trickeffects in his home movies, including slow motion, stop motion and per-sonalised intertitles, it is the subtler choices which I would argue are themost interesting with relation to the role the camera played with regardto his family.

When filming action sequences Bowser applies diverging styles. Inmany cases these images are composed of medium shots which seem tobe constructed spontaneously. The frame is constantly shifting to keepthe focus in the centre of the screen, cuts made in camera jump andjostle between near identical set-ups. These series of shots are punctu-ated by something completely different; close up portraits where his chil-dren stare, smile or smirk directly into the camera. In his 1929 and 1934holiday films Visit to Glassingall and Argaty and Nairn these shots areneatly composed with light softly illuminating the nuances of each boy’sface. The spectator is asked to gaze into a set of eyes which, without anyhesitation, gazes back. The juxtaposition of close up and medium shotsconstructs a clear pause in the action, seemingly changing not only the

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pacing but the aim of the sequence. No longer is the purpose of the hol-iday film to preserve a memory or experience but rather the cine camerais used to capture something else—a relationship or bond between fatherand child extricated from time.

Landscape sequences are composed and edited with the same level ofprecision and attention to detail as these portraitures. Every film whichBowser made in the 1920s and 1930s included several sequences devotedto natural spaces. In a similar manner to the professionally producedscenic, these were constructed out of a series of different static and pan-ning viewpoints. Close-ups of individual details were edited side by sidewith long shots taking in large vistas. The films used these combinationsto model different forms of spectator address as if replicating the sameinquisitive tone found in the early guidebooks. Whether the shots show-cased the family’s time at home or outside in various parts of Scotland,every landscape visual was presented in this same manner; removed fromthe overall pacing of the rest of the film and emphasised as somethingworth studying in great detail. For example, in the 1929 film Family atOverdale and Nairn, Bowser foregrounds the pattern and movement oftrees. One such image examining a group of branches swaying in the windappears directly after a series of shots of Bowser’s sons in military cos-tumes during a visit from the Boys Brigade. The image takes you directlyout of the action and performs as a kind of aesthetic pallet cleanser ratherthan traditional establishing shot before the next sequence dedicated to apicnic.

This style of landscape shot, punctuating the action with a contrast-ing contemplative tone, appears in many of his other holiday films. Twosuch examples evoke a longstanding trope related to framing found inboth travel literature and landscape painting. These examples utilise exist-ing features in the landscape like windows and doorways to constructand articulate the view for the spectator. This inside/outside dichotomyfirst appears in the 1929 film Visit to Glassingall where a windowinside the home reveals a snowscape outside. This privileged view relo-cates the spectator from the confines of a dark but secure snug to abright, shimmering other world. This shot is paired with another look-ing in the same direction but this time directly outside, embedding thespectator in the landscape that we had just been gazing out into. Inthe next sequence the same snowy landscape appears through differentangles. The juxtaposition of framings seems to play with the immersive

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style of the previous edit. We are no longer moving through the spacebut being provided with access to views only made possible through thecamera lens.

This motif of interior and exterior is replicated again in 1932. In thefilm Argaty Scenes , Bowser incorporates a doorway which appears in thecentre of the ruins of a long stone wall. This opening frames a small,picturesque meadow brightly lit and blowing softly in the breeze. In asimilar style to the previous example, this doorway is exploited in a vari-ety of ways in order to record a series of shots of the shadows cast bythe ruin. On one side the family is revealed enjoying a picnic, on theother we retreat into the contrasts of darkness and light ushering us sym-bolically back in time. This series of shots exploring particular details ofthe landscape appears alongside a very different set of images. This timeBowser chooses the sublime over the picturesque employing a long panof a mountainscape emulating the stance and perspective of his wife whois introduced in the next shot. Placing the vast and majestic beside thefar more intimate and enclosed articulates the constant negotiation whichoccurs while on tour for a certain privileged few. Here Bowser seems tobe engaging with larger questions about the role of the tourist’s gaze forhimself and his family. Conflicting models of collection and spectatorshipdefine his approach, he assesses and surveys as well as replicates a sense ofoverwhelming immersion.

The majority of home movies produced by Bowser are situated eithernear his home or in a series of Scottish locations that the family returnto year after year. Places like the Argaty estate and Nairn are filmed sofrequently that the collection of images almost begins to feel like a dis-section of the space in order to record every detail of the family’s timethere. This staging of home as familiar and accessible stands in contrastto the family’s trips across the border. Here the glance prevails and wholeareas are gathered up in spontaneous pans. One of these trips to Englandis featured in Early Days in 1930 . This film documents a tour throughStonehenge, Salisbury, Canterbury and Kent. Unlike the films shot onvacation in Scotland which highlight moving on foot, a great deal of thisfilm centres on the Rolls Royce which takes them across many of theareas. The trip is introduced by images of members of the family gettingin the car before various pans and tracking shots capture fleeting picturesof the villages and landscapes between each site. While places of inter-est like Stonehenge are shot in either long static shots or slow pans, the

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journey itself is embedded in the speed and kaleidoscopic sensations ofmodern travel. Like the train and steamboat before it, the car providesaccess to completely new routes and patterns of experience for Bowser.

Perceiving new spaces through the front windscreen and side win-dows elicited the same excitement as the early phantom rides and pansshot from the front or side of a moving train.35 Theorist WolfgangSchivelbusch referred to this form of mobility as “panoramic perception”.The velocity of motorised travel made perceiving the foreground impos-sible, taking away the space which enabled travellers to feel connectedto or embedded within the space they were looking at. The travellerwas “removed from that ‘total space’ which combined proximity anddistance” leading to a kind of separation from the landscape which hewas looking at.36 “Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional per-ception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects:the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus whichmoved him through the world. That machine and the motion it createdbecame integrated into his visual perception: thus he could only see thingsin motion”.37 The momentary exchange which defines this glance priedopen another kind of contemplative space which engaged within a dialec-tic of visual mastery and dissolution for the Bowser family.

Of course they were not alone in their fascination with motor tours.Motorised travel is referred to in a variety of amateur journals emphasisingthe novelty of the immersive experience as well as the dual roles played bycar and camera in the complete travel experience.38 Nicholson describesthis pairing as “embodying modernism and consumerism” which bothremained at the centre of the rise and drive to produce and display ama-teur films.39 Motor tours were not just changing the visceral and aestheticmakeup of travel but were also changing the physical pattern and flow ofindividuals across the country by slowly diverting some groups of trav-ellers away from the railways.40 Recording your motorised tour becamethe ultimate sign of status coupling completely new concepts of accessand mobility to the tourist’s identity in the 1930s. But while both objectsbecame increasingly ubiquitous parts of the travel experience (especially asthe price of both decreased in the following decades), the amateur travelfilm continued to avoid other outward signs of modern technology whiletravelling through or capturing sublime and picturesque scenery. Again,in a similar manner to the train and steamboat, the motor car and cameraquickly became naturalised aspects of touring the landscape, embedded

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within the much larger discursive tradition of travel and nature appreci-ation, while, at the same time, glorified by their owners as revolutionis-ing technological wonders which removed them from the spaces aroundthem.

The motor tour element represents just one, albeit central, reason whyBowser’s trip to England seems to be quite dissimilar to the rest of hiscollection of holiday films. His approach to England is very much in thestyle of the flâneur,41 casting a series of cursory gazes across blurry land-scapes in a manner which captures every region he moves through withthe same filter, whether he is in the car or on foot. Sites like Stonehengeor Hampton Court are collected like postcards rather than explored usingthe same level of intimate detail that similar tourist locations in Scotlandare documented. This means that even though his family continued tohave several links to England, the country remained very much other. Incontrast, his home and the holiday sites located in Scotland are presentedas the focal points of his experience of family. They remain places of con-tinual fascination and intimacy.

While Bowser’s holiday films seem to preserve an image of his familyas deeply steeped in the landscape yet separate and segregated from thesurrounding community, Frances Montgomery portrayed her family insomewhat the opposite manner. Like Bowser, Montgomery produced anumber of films in the late 1920s and across the 1930s, but unlike the for-mer, Montgomery documented her life and family as directly embeddedwithin the community of St. Andrews. The vast majority of her surviv-ing film collection features detailed coverage of important annual eventstaking place in the town and records of slightly more banal daily patternsand routines. Within the former category Montgomery filmed the KateKennedy parade, numerous special events held by businesses in the town,demonstrations put on by the fire brigade (of which Montgomery was aconvenor), and, of course, the election day in 1929 when she became acouncillor. Unlike other amateur and topical films which would also fea-ture similar content, Montgomery clearly relished the relationships shehad built up in her community. In the case of the yearly Kate Kennedyparade, Montgomery documented the event from its early initial prepa-rations through to the very end of the procession where members of thetown celebrated in fancy dress.42 Throughout the parade Montgomeryaddresses multiple people in the crowd who smile and chat away with heras she continues to film.

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This friendly, spontaneous tone seems to be a clear shift from thevoyeuristic tendencies displayed in many other amateur work, includingBowser’s. Rather than construct a protective separation between herselfand her subject, the cine camera seems to help her participate more fully,allowing her to immerse herself in the life of the community. This toneis possibly best expressed when Montgomery steps in front of the camerawith the help of her “nanny and companion” Margaret Grant Smith whois credited with filming many sections of the films herself.43 The relation-ship between Montgomery and Smith is one of the most fascinating partsof the collection. Smith takes over in order to document Montgomery’sday to day activities with her two children. Almost every film includessections of the family (usually without a male figure) playing in the yardand/or taking the two family dogs to the beach for a run or swim. UnlikeBowser, who not only rarely appears in front of the camera but also dis-plays his family in a particular vignette style, Montgomery and Smith taketurns in front of and behind the camera, constantly laughing and chattingas they switch roles. There is a certain joy and ease to the process whichallows the camera to turn into just another accessory of the game ratherthan a central figure. On two separate occasions Smith is even able tocapture Montgomery filming as well, demonstrating the choreographednature of the process.44 Montgomery films closeups of the family whileSmith documents the whole operation, giving the viewer access to howdecisions surrounding framing are carried out.

This glimpse at an amateur in action, exploring the shared creativelabour at the centre of the leisure activity, provides an interesting counter-narrative to the role the camera played in the home and hands of femaleamateurs in a time dominated by male filmmakers. While much of theamateur discourse captured and preserved in journals and trade press isdictated by male hobbyists, as Zimmermann argues, a few companies, likeBell and Howell, used images of women filmmakers to promote and “dif-ferentiat[e]” the equipment they marketed to the amateur as opposedto the professional, “These ads pictured women filmmakers chroniclingtheir children in the home or in nature; they equated amateurism withthe nuclear family. The image of a woman holding the camera signifiedthe camera’s lightness and compact style”.45 This emphasis on the stabletraditional family is very much at the heart of both Montgomery’s andBowser’s collection of home movies, but while Bowser remains behindthe scenes, following his wife, children and, often, staff, at arm’s length,Montgomery is an integral part of the action. Though this does not mean

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that she replicates the placid image of motherhood and femininity artic-ulated by the industry. Whether in front or behind the camera, she isconstantly in control of how her family and herself are portrayed. Mont-gomery also avoids being depicted as solely a mother figure using thecamera to preserve snapshots of her young family. Her collection not onlycaptures her various roles in her community but, just like Bowser’s, is alsoembedded in larger debates about the aesthetic and epistemological roleof the new technology.

Landscapes remain as predominant in Montgomery’s collection as inother amateur films made during the period. Sharing a similar functionto Bowser’s films, these natural spaces devoid of humans often constructmeaningful breaks in her films. They seem to emerge sandwiched betweenmedium and close-up shots of action sequences creating a period of visualrepose for the eye of the viewer. For example, in her work shot in St.Andrews, a series of intricate sculptural rock formations found along thebeach feature quite regularly in this role.46

When Montgomery and Smith go further afield other objects andviewpoints are explored. In 1930 the family visited Kames via a Clydesteamboat for a rambling holiday in the mountains. The trip is capturedin the film Montgomery Family Outings . Unlike much of the rest of thecollection which replicates the content and style of the early local topical,Outings is very much a scenic adventure piece. It gestures to every oneof the discourses and tropes which collided when nature appreciation andthe cine camera met in the early genre. The film opens by introducingthe viewer to each stage of the arduous trip up north. First the familyis shot on board a very bumpy and windy Clyde steamer. Close-ups andlong shots chart the slow progression along the river before medium shotsrelocate the family in a motor car setting off along a series of rural paths.It is this second mode of transport which is used as a segue to the moun-tainscapes which form the majority of the rest of the film. But unlike thedreamlike pans and tracking shots featured in Bowser’s tour of England,the mountains are revealed from the inside of a stopped car, just reachingout over the top of the front window frames. The sublime content of thisscene is displayed in the perfect contemplative setting; the car provides acomplete view all the while protecting the viewer from the wind and coldbellowing just outside.

Once the family has reached their destination the film continues withdifferent sequences of three particular styles of framing—we either arepresented with long detached contemplative sweeps of the mountains up

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above, close-up shots which tilt or pan to follow the eyeline of differentfamily members as they manoeuvre through the space, or action shots ofthe family either walking or taking time to look around at the scenery.These combinations construct slightly jarring juxtapositions of differentmodels of immersive and contemplative forms of spectatorial address. Bythe two minute mark we are presented with the first of these sequences.It opens with a long shot where the fore, middle and background areclearly defined as distinct planes. The camera rests on this image of themountains in the distance and does not penetrate the space in any way.Directly after we are presented with slight pans of the same landscapewhich seem to jump closer to the trees in the middle ground and thenshift slightly to reveal the family crossing a bridge at the edge of theframe. At this point the view from the bridge is revealed, but rather thanpresented in the same style as the others, the camera is pointed downdirectly at the water rushing below. In the next shot a slight tilt bringsour gaze even closer to the rocks visible underneath.

This drastic shift from contemplative and detached to immersive andvisceral repeats again near the end of the film. This time several shots fea-ture the torrent of water zigzagging through the landscape. The camerais again placed directly over the water, but this time each shot follows dif-ferent parts through slight pans and tilts. Every angle is displayed as if theviewer were being swept along inside of it. While this pattern of immersiveand contemplative framing could be found in a great many of the com-mercial scenics, Montgomery’s holiday film really takes this exploratoryapproach to landscape representation to its very edge, continuously shift-ing back and forth. But rather than feeling scattered and chaotic, the filmis able to provide a thru line in which the viewer can construct a narra-tive of sorts. That thru line is built by the images of the family physicallymoving through the landscape themselves. Here the camera is trying todo more than document what they see. It seems to be trying to repli-cate the pacing and sensations of moving (and playing) unencumberedthrough the space.

Montgomery Family Outings provides a rich and reflective tapestry oflandscape imagery and remains an excellent example of the role ram-bling and nature appreciation played in the rise of amateur holiday films.The film captures many of the threads which appeared in the precedingdecades surrounding film and its negotiation of the cultural practice. The“cinematic ramble”47 not only allowed family and friends to participatevirtually in the holiday but provided new opportunities for individuals toreplicate and sometimes challenge the style of gaze dictated by the travel

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industry. Since its emergence as a genre, the scenic had always tried toreach beyond what a human was capable of seeing and experiencing. Inthe hands of the amateur the camera seemed to press those boundarieseven further, providing a way for an individual to test and reveal an evenwider set of visceral and contemplative modes of spectatorship which wereeach inscribed with their own value judgements about subject and object.

When Outings is interpreted as part of the larger collection it high-lights the importance of the landscape shots which appear throughouteach of the other films. Rather than mere establishing or transitionaldevices, Montgomery and Smith explore the landscape as a way to bet-ter understand the nature of where they live, hoping, perhaps, that itwill reveal an unspoken truth about their own identity. Here there areclear links back to Bowser’s work. The relationship between leisure, land-scape and the cine camera articulate something which exceeds the param-eters of familial documentation prescribed by the early amateur indus-try for both filmmakers. The inclusion of vast amounts of scenic footageconfers significance beyond a utilitarian approach where natural spacesexist as backdrop scenery or a touristic one where views are displayed inorder to be collected and circulated back home. Bowser and Montgomeryweren’t satisfied with merely capturing and documenting but were equallyas interested in the role of the gaze itself, whether defined as immersive,contemplative, or a combination of the two.

Both amateurs tested and explored the role the cine camera playedin allowing them to access experiences and ideas previously restricted toprofessional topicals and scenics. They did so in ways that were deeplyembedded in the particular spatial rhythms of their lives; Bowser travellingfrom his secluded home to equally secluded leisure spots, encounteringthe rest of the world vicariously through the car windows, Montgomerycapturing her daily routine as intertwined with the larger rhythms ofthe sea and town, showcasing herself as a central figure in those ebbsand flows. Each family archive provides ample evidence of the complexand multidirectional process in which identities are formed and personalmeaning is codified.

These archives are also steeped in something else though: privilege.Early amateurs like Montgomery and Bowser not only had the time andmoney to invest in and embrace the technology in their homes, butaccess to spaces and experiences that many could only encounter on thescreen or in print. That status, both within their families and communi-ties, endowed their gaze with a kind of “impunity” not available outside

5 I NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT: AMATEUR FILMMAKING … 115

of the amateur setting.48 Being the person behind the camera allowedBowser and Montgomery to, in the words of Nicholson, “appropriat[e]other people and places as visual backdrops for personal narratives” repli-cating the drive for the consumption of “spectacle” which we see timeand time again in the professional travel films which documented the livesand landscapes of places even further away from home.49 They were theones able to confer meaning on to the people around them, whether thatwas the inclusion of staff members at play with Bowser’s children, or thefisherman bringing in what would be Montgomery’s family dinner. Thework of others becomes subsumed within the leisurely gaze of a detachedupper class, it is entirely removed from the process of memory-making ofthe person actually living it.

This privileged access and drive to consume had a similar effect onthe landscapes which were captured and dissected. Bowser and Mont-gomery both experienced space and place in what was the prescribedfashion dictated in almost every piece of early topographical writing andtour guide: alone. For the time period this in itself was a novelty bornout of class. Unlike the middle and working classes stuffed into trains andsteamboats, the Bowser and Montgomery families moved through thelandscapes either on foot or in a motor car, allowing them to access viewsthat would have been out of reach of those who depended on the masstourism industry to get them from point a to point b. Even when othermodes of transport are depicted, like when Montgomerys’ travel acrossthe Clyde, no other figures share the frame with the family. Behind thecamera both Montgomery and Bowser reflect the detached and enigmaticstyle of the Romantic figure, reaching out into the landscape as a way tograsp at something seemingly unavailable anywhere else. Nature respondsto the imagination of these amateurs in a manner distinct from its purelyvisual appeal.

But while the filmmakers were frequently taking on the role of aestheticadventurer, the spaces they explored were more often than not familiarones, landscapes which they considered part of their home, whether thatmeant quite literally their back garden or the landscapes surrounding theirholiday homes further north. What does it mean when home is imbuedwith many of the same tropes and significance as places usually thought ofas other? These spaces immediately seem to take on an interesting dialec-tic of familiar and unfamiliar. Rather than shifting from a contemplativeand detached position to become more immersed in a space that is under-stood as novel or significant in some manner, Montgomery and Bowser

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often participate in the reverse, removing themselves from places whichare part of their daily and seasonal spatial routines and exploring thosespaces from the other point of view. This ethnography of home subtlyplays with the divide usually placed between home and away, especially inrelation to the concept of leisure travel. This emphasis on the role of theembodied gaze and formation of space and place within personal identityhighlights the complex manner in which internal and external narrativesabout knowledge and experience shape the process of othering.

Here we begin to see the possibilities of disruption necessarily embed-ded within the tourist’s gaze. MacCannell argues that Urry’s gaze isdefined by a subject who believes themselves “free and all powerful”50

while, referring to the language of Lacan, really being “caught, manip-ulated” and “captured in the field of vision” prescribed by the tourismindustry.51 Once the subject becomes aware of the limits or contradictionsinherent to their position as tourist and ventures “beyond touristic repre-sentations” a “kernel of resistance” emerges which MacCannell refers toas the “second gaze”.52 As MacCannell argues, that gaze begins by “rec-ognizing the misrecognition that defines the tourist gaze”.53 This processcomes to the fore when the binary divisions between familiar and unfa-miliar begin to break down in both Bowser’s and Montgomery’s work.These filmmakers were no longer motivated by the value judgements asso-ciated with the “extraordinary”, but rather turned to the ordinary and theeveryday in order to unpack the role contact with certain spaces played innot just mirroring but changing their own understanding of subjectivity.This approach to looking was paradoxically only possible after decades ofbeing immersed within the discourses associated with both nature appre-ciation and leisure travel. By trying to negotiate these conflicting rhetori-cal patterns, small cracks began to reveal the structures which made thesedebates possible in the first place.

Perhaps equally as important as the process of production was the pro-cess of circulation and exhibition which occurred after. Over time eachcollection took on an increasingly central role in preserving a memorybank of intimate places and interactions that formed the corner stone foreach family’s internal narrative. With every passing year new levels of sig-nificance and nuance would be layered on to every shot, providing fami-lies with the ability to construct and reconstruct the storytelling process,making the original meaning something that remained “provisional andfluid”.54 Unlike the commercial scenics which circulated widely but werelikely watched only once by each audience member, the amateur travelfilm would be watched over and over again, albeit only by a very few.

5 I NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT: AMATEUR FILMMAKING … 117

While the numbers and style of audience engagement may be very differ-ent, this often ritualistic commitment to reliving particular moments onfilm replicates what theorist William Uricchio describes as the “liveness”in the early single static shot film.55 Audiences flocked to the technologybecause it allowed them to access the world around them in a completelynew fashion while still referring back to those initial debates posed by thefirst nature enthusiasts: How do we look at and move through naturalspaces? How do these models of spectatorship change our relationshipwith these landscapes and with ourselves?

This intense attraction to seeing familiar spaces as “living pictures”highlights an underlying dichotomy which also enveloped the commercialscenics. Unlike the guidebooks that accompanied a person on tour, thecommercial and amateur scenic featured only before or after. Immobilemodes of spectatorship practiced when visiting the cinema or watching atravel film at home equipped each traveller with a framework that wouldallow them to confidently approach any space, and, if they were part ofthe small group who could afford it, capture it on film. The seeminglyparadoxical entwinement of the mobile and immobile, both by-productsof modernity, armed tourists with the visual framework they needed inorder to access overwhelming experiences in a way that reaffirmed thevalues and “retained an umbilical cord”56 to home. Here the scenic con-structed a kind of “insulation” from the “overwhelming threat of disloca-tion” which was built into the new worlds made possible by modernity.57

Amateur work continued to expand and complicate these initial themesby incorporating nature appreciation into the intimate daily and seasonalpatterns of movement which constructed and reconstructed the internalfamily narratives that defined who each family was and how they sawthemselves. While both Montgomery and Bowser viewed the world androle as filmmakers through a particularly privileged viewpoint, their col-lections provide film and cultural theorists with evidence of not only therole familiar spaces played in the complex dynamic of personal identityformation but also the effect that commercial scenics and other indus-try material had on the actual spatial patterns and models of spectator-ship performed. Amateur filmmakers were constantly working in dialoguewith the commercial genre, renegotiating the aesthetic and epistemologi-cal approaches that they had seen in a way that could be embedded withinthe personal rhythms of their families.

In Scotland this ability to test the stylistic approaches to landscapethat were circulated by the industry allowed amateurs like Montgomery

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and Bowser to engage in the wider debate surrounding the incursion ofindustrialisation in rural parts of the country. In this sense these amateurfilms can be read as symptomatic of larger ripples of unease revealing linksbetween personal, regional and national identity structures. The cine cam-era helped amateurs reinvest in the natural spaces which had been usedto historically differentiate themselves from those living down south, pro-jecting both familiarity and difference. It helped them reflect upon therole landscape played in their everyday lives as well as reinforce the sig-nificance of those experiences within the storytelling process. And as thecamera became an even more powerful tool for negotiating the precar-iousness of the interwar period, the medium itself became more tightlyintertwined with the pastoral and pre-modern. This process of naturali-sation occurred while the technology continued to alter the very natureof first-hand experience in the collection and consolidation of identity.Not only did amateur filmmaking change how individuals moved throughand looked at the world around them but it transformed their ability toremember and, perhaps more importantly, forget.58

Notes1. Heather Norris Nicholson, “At Home and Abroad with Cine Enthusi-

asts: Regional Amateur Filmmaking and Visualizing the Mediterranean,ca. 1928–1962,” GeoJournal 59, no. 4 (2004): 325.

2. While many companies had been developing products for the home mar-ket during the first few decades of the twentieth century, Nicholson arguesthat the “breakthrough” occurred in the early 1920s. Heather NorrisNicholson, Amateur Film, Meaning and Practice 1927 –1977 (Manch-ester: Manchester UP, 2012), 3–4.

3. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 5.4. “Bowser of Argaty and the King’s Lundies, David Stewart,” in Who Was

Who (Online: Oxford University Press, 2007). https://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U8337. Accessed 30 Jan-uary 2020.

5. London Gazette (June 17, 1921), 4821.6. Frances Hedges Montgomery, dir., Town Council Election Day (United

Kingdom, 1929).7. Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: Social History of Amateur Film

(Indiana: Indiana UP, 1995); Ian Craven ed. Movies on Home Ground:Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Pub-lishing, 2009); Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, Meaning and Practice

5 I NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT: AMATEUR FILMMAKING … 119

1927 –1977 (2012). See Mathew Kerry, “The Changing Face of the Ama-teur Holiday Film in Britain as Constructed by Post-War Amateur CineWorld (1945–1951),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 34,no. 4 (2014) 511.

8. Kerry, 511.9. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 106.

10. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 176.11. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 107.12. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 95.13. Kerry, 515.14. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 175.15. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 175.16. Alastair J. Durie, Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scot-

land, 1780–1939 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003), 192.17. But for some this period of travel and leisure did not last, by 1929 and

the start of the Great Depression, working class communities drasticallychanged their travel itineraries, see Durie, 192–193.

18. Durie, 192.19. Durie, 192.20. This nationalistic focus on the English countryside would be repeated after

the Second World War as well. See Kerry, 516.21. M. A. Lovell Burgess, A Popular Account of the Amateur Cine Movement

in Great Britain (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1932), 65, ascited in Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 175.

22. Gordon Malthouse, “Do Not Try to Be ‘Different at all Costs’ in MakingYour Holiday Film,” Amateur Cine World (June 1947): 237–238, citedin Kerry, 517.

23. “Ten Best Films of the Year,” Amateur Cine World (May 1951): 34–35,cited in Kerry, 521.

24. G. H. Sewell, “Rambling with a Cine-Camera,” Amateur Cine World 1,no. 3 (1934): 162–163, cited in Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 182.

25. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 177.26. Gordon Malthouse, “Inquest on a Holiday Film: 3 Colour Continuity,”

Amateur Cine World (December 1949): 681, cited in Kerry, 518.27. “Ten Best Films of the Year,” Amateur Cine World (May 1951), 35, cited

in Kerry, 521.28. Tony Rose, “If I Did Make a Holiday Film,” Amateur Cine World

(September 1951): 457, cited in Kerry, 521.29. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 183.30. Hayden Lorimer, ‘Your Wee Bit Hill and Glen’: The Cultural Politics of the

Scottish Highlands, c. 1918–1945 (PhD Thesis, Loughborough University,1997), 19–20.

31. Lorimer, 176.

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32. Lorimer, 176.33. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 200.34. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 200.35. See Samantha Wilson, “The Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contempla-

tion in Early British Scenic Filmmaking,” Early Popular Visual Culture14, no. 3 (2016): 255–261.

36. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization andPerception of Time and Space (Berkeley: University of California, 1986),63.

37. Schivelbusch, 64.38. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 181–182.39. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 181–182.40. Durie, 195.41. Norris Nicholson suggests a similar connection in her article “At Home

and Abroad with Cine Enthusiasts”(p. 329) where she refers to the follow-ing quote from Susan Sontag’s On Photography (Harmondsworth: Pen-guin, 1979), 55: “the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque’.”

42. See Frances Hedges Montgomery, dir., Kate Kennedy Parade No. 2(United Kingdom, 1928) and Frances Hedges Montgomery, dir., KateKennedy Parade No. 1 (United Kingdom, 1929).

43. Examples include Frances Hedges Montgomery, dir., Montgomery Fam-ily Outings (United Kingdom, 1930), Frances Hedges Montgomery,dir., Montgomery Family Holidays (United Kingdom, 1928–1930), andFrances Hedges Montgomery, dir., Penniwells and St. Andrews (UnitedKingdom, 1929).

44. See Frances Hedges Montgomery, dir., Montgomery Family Outings(United Kingdom, 1930).

45. Zimmermann, 61.46. Frances Hedges Montgomery, dir., Penniwells and St. Andrews (United

Kingdom, 1929).47. The “pleasure” associated with the “cinematic ramble” was stressed in the

earliest issues of the ACW including G. H. Sewell’s, “Rambling with aCine-Camera,” Amateur Cine World 1, no. 3 (1934): 162–163, cited inNorris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 182.

48. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 176.49. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 176.50. Dean MacCannell, “Tourist Agency,” Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 31.51. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New

York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 92 as cited in MacCannell, 30.52. MacCannell, 31.53. MacCannell, 30.54. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 20.

5 I NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT: AMATEUR FILMMAKING … 121

55. William Uricchio, “Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Non-fictionFilm,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. DaanHertogs and Nico De Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmu-seum, 1997), 130.

56. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 190.57. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 190.58. Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film, 96.

References

2007. Bowser of Argaty and the King’s Lundies, David Stewart. In Who WasWho. Online: Oxford University Press. https://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U8337. Accessed 30 January 2020.

Craven, Ian (ed.). 2009. Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cin-ema. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Durie, Alastair J. 2003. Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scot-land, 1780–1939. East Linton: Tuckwell.

Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. NewYork: W.W. Norton.

1921. London Gazette. June 17.Lorimer, Hayden. 1997. ‘Your Wee Bit Hill and Glen’: The Cultural Politics of

the Scottish Highlands, c. 1918–1945. PhD Thesis, Loughborough University.Lovell Burgess, M.A. 1932. A Popular Account of the Amateur Cine Movement

in Great Britain. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co.MacCannell, Dean. 2001. Tourist Agency. Tourist Studies 1 (1): 23–37.Malthouse, Gordon. 1947. Do Not Try to Be ‘Different at All Costs’ in Making

Your Holiday Film. Amateur Cine World. June: 236.——. 1949. Inquest on a Holiday Film: 3 Colour Continuity. Amateur Cine

World. December: 681–684.Kerry, Mathew. 2014. The Changing Face of the Amateur Holiday Film in

Britain as Constructed by Post-War Amateur Cine World (1945–1951). His-torical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 34 (4): 511–527.

Norris Nicholson, Heather. 2004. At Home and Abroad with Cine Enthusiasts:Regional Amateur Filmmaking and Visualizing the Mediterranean, ca. 1928–1962. GeoJournal 59, no. 4: 325–333.

———. 2012. Amateur Film, Meaning and Practice 1927–1977. Manchester:Manchester UP.

Rose, Tony. 1951. If I Did Make a Holiday Film. Amateur Cine World. Septem-ber: 457.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization andPerception of Time and Space. Berkeley: University of California.

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Sewell, G. H. 1934. Rambling with a Cine-Camera. Amateur Cine World 1, no.3: 162–163.

Sontag, Susan. 1979. On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin.1951. Ten Best Films of the Year. Amateur Cine World. May: 34–35.Wilson, Samantha. 2016. The Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation in

Early British Scenic Filmmaking. Early Popular Visual Culture 14 (3): 255–261.

Uricchio, William. 1997. Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Non-fictionFilm. In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. Daan Her-togs and Nico De Klerk, 119–131. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Film-museum.

Zimmermann, Patricia R. 1995. Reel Families: Social History of Amateur Film.Indiana: Indiana UP.

Filmography

Bowser, David Charles. dir. 1927. Family at Nairn. United Kingdom.———. 1928. Lorna and Jock’s Wedding . United Kingdom.———. 1928. Argaty People and Places . United Kingdom.———. 1928. Agricultural and Highland Shows , 1928. United Kingdom.———. 1929. Visit to Glassingall . United Kingdom.———. 1929. Doune Show, Argaty Thro’ the Year . United Kingdom.———. 1929. Family at Overdale and Nairn, 1929 . United Kingdom.———. 1930. Early Days in 1930 . United Kingdom.———. 1932. Argaty Scenes 1932. United Kingdom.———. 1933. The Family at Nairn, 1933. United Kingdom.———. 1934. Argaty and Nairn, 1934. United Kingdom.Montgomery, Frances Hedges. dir. 1928. Kate Kennedy Parade No. 2. United

Kingdom.———. 1928. Cart Horse Show. United Kingdom.———. 1928. Penniwells and St. Andrews . United Kingdom.———. 1929. Kate Kennedy Parade No. 1. United Kingdom.———. 1929. Town Council Election Day. United Kingdom.———. 1930. Amateur Golf Championship St Andrews. United Kingdom.———. 1930. Montgomery Family Outings. United Kingdom.———. 1930. Montgomery Family Holidays. United Kingdom.———. 1934. Montgomery Family—New House. United Kingdom.———. 1934. Clay Pigeon Shooting. United Kingdom.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Abstract The concluding chapter reflects on how the material and con-ceptual shift between the frame and the screen redefined the role of theembodied gaze. This process is discussed through the work of StanleyCavell and examines the part both play in negotiating our relationshipwith subjectivity and the outside world.

Keywords Scenic filmmaking · Great Britain · Cinematic frame · Traveland tourism · Stanley Cavell · Screen

Beneath every glance or gaze are layers of complex and often compet-ing values and discourses. Nature appreciation is no different. As a per-formed set of embodied looking, marvelling at a particular view is con-structed out of a plethora of acknowledged and unacknowledged texts,technologies and forms of rhetoric that circulate at an increasing speedaround and across homes, communities and countries. The manner inwhich these meaning structures are negotiated and formalised can tellus a great deal about the narratives we tell about ourselves and others.As John Berger quite astutely recognised many decades ago “We neverlook just at one thing, we are always looking at the relation betweenthings and ourselves”.1 Those relationships are often organised and clas-sified by cultural and economic forces which have a vested interest inestablishing and maintaining particular hierarchies and narratives. In the

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case of the tourism industry, various pieces of place-imagery and tropes,borrowed in part from debates in environmental aesthetics, were utilisedin order to increase its reach and sell tickets. This pairing of place and lan-guage embedded itself into the foundations of domestic tourism, definingthe shared histories and experiences necessary to construct an “imaginedcommunity”2 out of disparate regions.

In many ways it is the complex, fragmentary and often contradictorynature of those very narratives which can help us understand how thetourism industry rearticulated the parameters of discourse surroundingenvironmental appreciation and its embedded gaze. Travel writing andguidebooks were the first stage in this process. As we have seen, a rangeof philosophers, critics and writers attempted to make sense of the over-whelming variety of new aesthetic experiences which they encounteredwhile travelling by constructing a series of new concepts and modes ofappreciation like the sublime and the picturesque. Each concept strad-dled its own dialectic of order and excess. The sublime in particularplayed a central role within the Scottish context. The term had a paradox-ical effect; it allowed travellers to address, articulate and maximise theiraesthetic experience when coming into contact with specific landscapeswhile also introducing a rhetorical lens which couched the experiencewithin a dichotomy of self and other, largely defamiliarising the spacesand the communities found therein. Both facets of sublimity were inter-woven within the travel writing and, eventually, guidebooks, producedand circulated across the period. The writing process in fact allowed trav-ellers like Diggle and the Wordsworths’ to move and perform “through”3

the landscape, to problematize models of immersion and contemplation,even if they felt that language sometimes fell short of truly representingtheir experiences.4 Writing became the tool in which each woman “em-ploy[ed]” the “metaphorical and physical frames” they needed to not just“order, organize and achieve authority over the experience of travel” but“facilitate” contact and “connection, between self and other”.5

Moving image technology emerged within this larger discourse, cap-italising on the representational limits inherent to language. The scenicgenre in particular existed at the intersection of travel and nature appreci-ation. Companies like the Charles Urban Trading Company promotedthemselves as providing something akin to direct contact, circulatingimages of some of the remotest Scottish locations across the rest ofGreat Britain. This “dissemination of place”6 and people replicated aseries of debates about the nature of culture and its relationship to

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landscape. While collections depicting Scotland largely promoted anessentialist view of regional and local communities, especially within thecontext of the home tour, the points of contact embedded within thetwentieth-century excursion map did begin to highlight a fluid ratherthan “bounded”7 conception of cultural identity. These “mutual entan-glement[s]”8 where “distinctions between producer and consumers, hostsand tourists [were] challenged”, 9 like in the films depicting working classleisure travel, explored how landscapes and communities were constructedthrough the travel performance, extending previous concepts of home.But while scenics increasingly depicted a range of travel itineraries andmodes of spectatorship, they remained tied to the map and rhetoric ofthe established tourism network and largely masked the loss of physicalaccess felt by a great many communities in the country.

Amateur filmmakers responded to the constricted and often commer-cial nature of the scenic genre by introducing their own formal experi-mentation, albeit from a privileged point of view. They extended the nar-rativisation of home and away, using moving image technology to recon-struct the landscapes which their families were already a part of. Theirfilms not only documented the manner in which public debate surround-ing landscape aesthetics permeated into the private sphere but also theimportance of travel and access to the transformation of the embodiedgaze both when away and when returning back home. Borrowing fromDavid Crouch’s work on tourism, Montgomery and Bowser didn’t solelymove through or look at spaces, but actively “practis[ed]” them.10 Whilethe two filmmakers utilised many of the same formal and rhetorical framescirculated by earlier travel writing and commercial scenics, they no longerunderstood those frames as “barriers” to the natural world.11 Rather theframes allowed both people to see “through from one space into anoth-er… facilitat[ing] the dissolution of boundaries”12 and problematizingnotions of the familiar while also increasing the number of spaces theyconsidered home. This process of reflexivity and recognition would even-tually repurpose the narratives surrounding environmental appreciationfor larger and larger communities on both sides of the border.

From the Frame to the Screen

At the heart of each of the scenics and travelogues explored in this bookis an underlying concern about deriving meaning and order out of theexcesses of the natural landscape. While the sponsored film attempted to

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isolate particular qualities as visual markers of what was on offer for thetourist, other professional and amateur films tried to juxtapose as manydifferent models of spectatorship as possible in order to test out eachone’s ability to elicit different aesthetic and visceral responses. No matterhow each film responded to the views and landscapes set in front of them,they seized upon the potentialities of the moving image camera, puttingthe question of the role of the frame back into the centre of their visuallanguage, and, therefore, gesturing to the series of debates that had goneon before them.

The frame, whether physical, conceptual or rhetorical, has always prob-lematised the moment of contact between subject and world making whatis at stake in its negotiation central to not only environmental apprecia-tion but identity formation as well. As Tom Gunning suggests in “TheWhole World Within Reach”, each formal device employed by the mov-ing image reconstructed the possibilities and limitations of the traditionalconceptualisation of the frame and followed from a lineage of technologi-cal and representational devices which all “project[ed] the idea that there[was] something insufficient about the simple framed perspectival illu-sion… While traditionally these supplements are thought of as attemptsat greater realism, it might be more useful to think of them as attempts toovercome the limits of the traditional picture and its frame”.13 Unlike pre-vious representational technologies, like the photograph, once the camerabecomes mobile it interrogates those limits by addressing a new elementin the debate; the role of the screen. Formal devices like the pan andthe tracking shot, which became central features of the scenic and travel-ogue, survey the limits of the frame and screen by gesturing towards theirown boundaries. The problem of “greater realism” and linear perspectivebecome intertwined in a debate over competing representational valueswhen addressing the world.

By mimicking the look of the spectator, the camera reminds the viewerof what looking essentially does, it collects and compares a certain expanseof space while cutting out and ignoring the rest. By turning from side toside, even in a 360-degree pan, the camera problematises its own abilityto present, to put on display, to establish and orient its spectator withinthat space. The difficulty of finding the perfect vantage point when actu-ally on location is that no matter how one orients oneself in relation toa view, experience is always impacted and complicated by sensory detailswhich occur outside the limits of our immediate vision, whether those are

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sounds, smells, physical sensations, or, perhaps, past impressions of mov-ing through the space previously. A view and its appreciation is thereforenever purely a set of visual stimuli. Early film, more so than any otherperiod, presented that complexity in the articulation of on- and off-screenspace. The pan attempts to incorporate space in its visual totality, placingother aspects of sensory experience and context in the hands of the show-man. But by attempting to present all of a view it gestures towards theparallel limitations of our own embodied awareness and the edges of thescreen. The camera always in fact runs up against the edge because it canonly present so much within the confines of the screen at one time. Theparadoxical relationship between the screen and the frame are problema-tised at the same time as our own experience within space.

Here we see the way film technology and formal techniques renego-tiated the relationship between the spectator and objects in space, and,therefore, renegotiated some of the original causal concerns of the the-oreticians’ debating the role of first-hand experience in aesthetic judge-ment. The screen already frames the world for the subject. It prejudgeswhich aspects are important aesthetically and how they relate to the over-all view. Once that camera begins to move it addresses that framework as aproblem to be resolved. And while the early scenics and travelogues usedcontact and “liveness” as a way to entice and thrill audiences, the audi-ences were never actually in any danger from the objects and scenes theysaw.14 The majority of audiences were perfectly aware of their detachmentfrom the world presented to them.15 What these scenic and traveloguefilms did play with is the precarious role of the screen in relation to theworld it depicts, what Stanley Cavell argues is film’s function within thelong philosophical debate over contact between subject and object.

In Cavell’s The World Viewed he is concerned with both how real-ity is accessed automatically by the camera, and with what happens tothat reality when it is projected, screened, exhibited and viewed. Hebegins by comparing painting to photography. While every painting couldbe described as a world, photography is “of the world”,16 it projectsmoments of the past which are fragments of reality. In the case of pho-tography it always makes sense to wonder what the objects in the photoobscure and what lies “beyond the frame”.17 In cinema that world is pro-jected onto a screen which places the world before us and at the same timekeeps it from us. Human agency is therefore critically absent twice, at thetime of inception and, in a manner of speaking, at the time of viewing. Hewrites, “It screens me from the world it holds – that is, makes me invisible.

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And it screens that world from me-that is, screens its existence from me.That the projected world does not exist (now) is its only difference fromreality”.18

Cavell argues that the world’s presence and our absence satisfies a wishborn prior to the Reformation, its goal—the ability “to escape subjec-tivity and metaphysical isolation”.19 Both painting and film struggle ina dialectic with scepticism. Forced into isolation by our own subjectivity,these creative media allowed for the possibility of a phenomenological andepistemological connection with reality. But painting could only ever givematerial weight to our presence in the world; it is incapable of convincingus that the world already exists without us. The “material basis” of cin-ema, “a succession of automatic world projections”,20 places that world inour presence while also withholding it from our reach.21 Film does notreveal reality, it can’t present us with something other than what is placedin front of it, it is instead a “moving image of skepticism”,22 a vehicle forthe debate between philosophy and psychology. In “More of The WorldViewed” Cavell writes, “It is a fact that here our normal senses are satisfiedof reality while reality does not exist – even, alarmingly, because it doesnot exist, because viewing it is all it takes”.23 Reality seems to be placedbefore us, and yet what we see is not real but an apparition torn from thepast, leading us to question not only the existence of the world outside ofourselves but also whether any method can possibly offer us viable proofof its existence. Each spectator therefore shifts between states of beliefand doubt as they try to reconcile their relationship to the world throughthe projected images on screen. The limits that cinema acknowledges, likein Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s panoramic perception, are “its outsideness toits world, and my absence from it”.24

Cavell’s conceptualisation of the screen and its role in the larger debateover scepticism in both philosophical and public discourses highlightsthe importance of the representational technology in reconstructing ourunderstanding of ourselves and the outside world. The screen and pro-jected moving image provided a counterpoint to the poetic gaze asdefined by the Romantic period just over half a century prior. Cavelldescribes this earlier world view as a wish to “imitate not the look ofnature, but its conditions, the possibilities of knowing nature at all and oflocating ourselves in a world”.25 While William Wordsworth understoodthe role of representation as emblematic of his own subjectivity, as com-pletely intertwined with the natural world, and therefore necessary for“our conviction in reality”,26 cinema provided a way back to that reality

6 CONCLUSION 129

without the necessity for subjectivity, a world that is present to us with-out relying on our presence in it. In the end the scenic became a toolthat could address both engagement and detachment by redirecting theattention of the viewer away from the content to the manner in whichthe content was being framed, constructing a form of reflexivity withinthe overlap between the two. In this sense cinema and the genre dra-matically transformed the measure of both our perceptual experience andbelief, it relit the precarious state of subject and object by problematisingengagement.

Of course, Cavell constructs his argument in conceptual isolation,where the images on screen are of the world but not necessarily the dayto day world of the viewer themselves. What happens when film displaysthe natural and built landscapes that will meet the spectator immediatelyas they leave the cinema? The paths, streams and trees that a viewer maywake up to each morning, move through everyday? What happens whenthe existential dread embedded in the philosophical discourse permeatesthe intimate spaces which define a person’s spatial identity? Here thepast, present and future seem to coexist and the dialectic of presence andabsence are negotiated reflexively. Scenic filmmaking transformed how theembodied gaze came to terms with these everyday encounters. No longerprosaic and neglected, the natural spaces which defined home and com-munity opened on to a much more complex set of expectations about howcontact with the world altered our conception of our own subjectivity andhow we in turn altered the very possibility of said contact. Professionaland amateur filmmakers replicated this phenomenological and epistemo-logical tension by inscribing the gaze with both embedded and detachedcharacteristics, articulating spectatorship as something that needed a res-olution that was continuously out of reach. As MacCannell argues withreference to the potential of the tourist gaze to deconstruct the appara-tuses which define it, “The second gaze is always aware that somethingis being concealed from it; that there is something missing from everypicture, from every look or glance… It looks for the unexpected, not theextraordinary, objects and events that may open a window in structure, achance to glimpse the real”.27

Cinema had a distinct and radical role in reshaping nature apprecia-tion from its very outset. The complexity of this project only increaseswhen the industry and its films are interpreted within the context ofthe communities they depict. Here deeply subversive arguments born outof the initial aesthetic discourses associated with first-hand contact, taste

130 S. WILSON

and appreciation were interwoven with politically charged rhetoric symp-tomatic of the anxiety surrounding national identity, modernisation andtechnology. The combination of the two had a profound effect on Scot-land at the turn of the century. Already negotiating their physical, politicaland economic position along the periphery of Britain, regional commu-nities across Scotland were also attempting to construct their identitiesout of, and as portals to, increasing patterns of transborder travel andtourism. Cinema brought different, often competing forms of the touristgaze to the fore, circulating place-imagery produced by both interna-tional, English and Scottish, companies and filmmakers across the coun-try. The first two relied on particular landscapes and tropes which hadbecome synonymous with a “highland lifestyle” to dictate a simplistic andproblematic message about who these communities were, how they livedand what their relationship was to the spaces they moved through. Thelatter attempted to reassert their own, far more complex and participatorynarratives about identity formation and nature appreciation.

Over five decades later little has changed with regard to the media land-scape and popular rhetoric surrounding Scottish landscapes and travel.There remains a continuous output of nature documentaries recordingthe changing seasons in the Highlands, and dramatic series, like Out-lander, populating these landscapes with visions of the past. The popular-ity of the latter has bred its own tourist markers and itineraries, bring-ing large groups of international visitors to the small villages of Cul-ross and Falkland in Fife.28 Alongside these expanding areas of tourism,nature appreciation remains central to the construction of many commu-nity identities across the country, with rambling and hillwalking groupscontinuing to organise tours both at home and slightly farther afield.29

Bridging the two is a steady stream of popular articles and news segmentsshowcasing the psychological, physical and sociological benefits of beingoutside in natural settings.30 Much of these new cultural threads are areflection of how we are coming to terms with very real fears about ourshared ecological future. So, while rhetoric and imagery associated withtraditional environmental movements, like the picturesque and sublime,may have lost their aesthetic and critical weight, our relationship with thenatural world remains as precarious and subversive as ever before, foreverexceeding the frameworks we attempt to understand it with. By turn-ing back to the initial narratives which fused landscape and identity, wecan become better equipped to interrogate the complex material and cul-tural forces which have long denied and relocated agency outside of the

6 CONCLUSION 131

communities who experience the effects first-hand. Their experience withthese spaces has always transcended the simplistic dichotomies of homeand away and subject and object which have fueled the tourism industry.

Notes1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC & Penguin Books, 1972), 9.2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 6, 22.3. David Crouch, “Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters,” in

Tourism, Between Place and Performance, eds. Simon Coleman and MikeCrang (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 213.

4. Zoë Kinsley, Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 (Hampshire: Ash-gate, 2008), 93. See also Samantha Wilson, “Wordsworth and the Walk-ing Tour,” in Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation in the SublimeView: Nature Tours and Early Scenic Filmmaking in Great Britain (PhDthesis: Concordia University, 2016) for a wider discussion of the limita-tions of language as way of representing the sublime.

5. Kinsley, 80.6. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, “Grounded Tourists, Travelling The-

ory,” in Tourism, Between Place and Performance, eds. Simon Colemanand Mike Crang (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 11.

7. Coleman and Crang, 5.8. Coleman and Crang, 6.9. Coleman and Crang, 5.

10. Crouch, 217.11. Crouch, 217.12. Kinsley, 80.13. Tom Gunning, “‘The Whole World Within Reach’ Travel Images With-

out Borders,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff(Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 34.

14. William Uricchio, “Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Non-fictionFilm,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. DaanHertogs and Nico De Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmu-seum, 1997), 130.

15. Early historical accounts of audiences terrified of the first screening ofLumière’s Train Pulling into a Station, have largely been discountedas apocryphal. As Stephen Bottomore notes, while there were cases ofindividuals fainting during the first screenings, the majority of reactionswere enthusiastic. See “The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and the‘Train Effect’,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 19, no.2 (1999): 177–216.

132 S. WILSON

16. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film,enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979), 23.

17. Cavell, 23.18. Cavell, 24.19. Cavell, 21.20. Cavell, 72.21. Cavell, 118.22. Cavell, 188.23. Cavell, 189.24. Cavell, 146.25. Cavell, 113.26. Cavell, 22.27. Dean MacCannell, “Tourist Agency”, Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001), 36.28. See Insight Department, The Outlander Effect and Tourism (Fife: Visit

Scotland, 2019), 3, accessed October 2019, https://www.visitscotland.org/binaries/content/assets/dot-org/pdf/research-papers-2/20190314-outlander-effect-2019.pdf.

29. There are several rambling and hillwalking groups across the countryincluding the Glasgow Ramblers, Paisley Hillwalking Club, Perth Hill-walking Club, and Fife Walking Club.

30. The preservation organisation Sierra Club and newspaper The Guardianpublished articles tracing and comparing scientific approaches to iso-lating and studying feelings of awe in individuals encountering nat-ural landscapes: Jake Abrahamson, “The Science of Awe,” SierraClub, October 2, 2014, accessed December 22, 2014, http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-6-november-december/feature/science-awe?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=20141014_AweScience. Oliver Burkeman, “Awe: The Powerful Emotion withStrange and Beautiful Effects,” The Guardian (London), August18, 2015, accessed August 18, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/oliver-burkeman-column/2015/aug/18/awe-powerful-emotion-strange-beautiful-effects. There have also been several recentarticles referring to the health benefits of nature walks, see DamianCarrington, “Two-Hour ‘Dose’ of Nature Significantly Boosts Health-Study,” The Guardian (London), June 13, 2019, accessed July 15, 2019,https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/13/two-hour-dose-nature-weekly-boosts-health-study-finds.

6 CONCLUSION 133

References

Abrahamson, Jake. 2014. The Science of Awe. Sierra Club, October 2.http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-6-november-december/feature/science-awe?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=20141014_AweScience. Accessed December 22, 2014.

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC & Penguin Books.Bottomore, Stephen. 1999. The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and the

‘Train Effect.’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 19, no. 2:177–216.

Burkeman, Olivia. 2015. Awe: The Powerful Emotion with Strange andBeautiful Effects. The Guardian (London), August 18. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/oliver-burkeman-column/2015/aug/18/awe-powerful-emotion-strange-beautiful-effects. Accessed August 18, 2015.

Carrington, Damian. 2019. Two-Hour ‘Dose’ of Nature Significantly BoostsHealth-Study. The Guardian (London), June 13. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/13/two-hour-dose-nature-weekly-boosts-health-study-finds. Accessed July 15, 2019.

Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film.Enlarged Ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Coleman, Simon, and Mike Crang. 2002. Grounded Tourists, Travelling Theory.In Tourism, Between Place and Performance, eds. Simon Coleman and MikeCrang, 1–20. New York: Berghahn Books.

Crouch, David. 2002. Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters. In Tourism,Between Place and Performance, eds. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, 207–218. New York: Berghahn Books.

Gunning, Tom. 2006. ‘The Whole World Within Reach’ Travel Images WithoutBorders. In Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff, 25–41.Durham: Duke UP.

Kinsley, Zoë. 2008. Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812. Hampshire: Ash-gate.

MacCannell, Dean. 2001. Tourist Agency. Tourist Studies 1, no. 1: 23–37.Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and

Perception of Time and Space. Berkeley: U of California.Wilson, Samantha. 2016a. Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation in the

Sublime View: Nature Tours and Early Scenic Filmmaking in Great Britain.PhD thesis, Concordia University.

134 S. WILSON

———. 2016b. The Aesthetics of Astonishment and Contemplation in EarlyBritish Scenic Filmmaking. Early Popular Visual Culture 14, no. 3: 255–261.

Uricchio, William. 1997. Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Non-fictionFilm. In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, eds. Daan Her-togs and Nico De Klerk, 119–131. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Film-museum.

Index

AAccess, 5–7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 24,

30, 32, 33, 40, 67, 77, 80, 82,91, 92, 102, 108, 109, 111, 114,115, 117, 125

Acres, Birt, 70Adamson, Jean, 1, 16, 82, 93Agriculture, 84Amateur, 9, 11, 15, 81, 100–106,

109–118, 125, 126, 129filmmaking, 16, 99–101, 118, 129

Amateur Cine World (ACW ),102–104, 120

Attractions, 55, 57, 83, 87, 117sacralization of, 83

BBeauty, 5, 25–28, 33, 60, 62. See also

Environmental aestheticsBonnie Scotland collection, 13, 60, 63.

See also Charles Urban TradingCompany

Bottomore, Stephen, 89, 94, 131

Bowser, David Charles, 100, 105–112,114–118, 125. See also Amateur,filmmaking

Burke, Edmund, 17, 28, 45Burnet, Thomas, 26, 45

CCaithness, 63, 64, 92Calder, Robert, 86, 89, 92, 94Cavell, Stanley, 127–129, 132. See also

Frame; ScreenCharles Urban Trading Company, 13,

14, 52, 59, 69, 71, 94, 124. Seealso Bonnie Scotland collection;Urban, Charles

Classmiddle, 2, 3, 6, 10, 13, 29, 30,

32, 35, 43, 59–61, 68, 75–79,82–84, 87–89, 91, 102, 105,115

working, 2, 3, 6, 14, 16, 30, 75–79,83–86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 115,119, 125

Clyde, 60, 80, 82, 84, 88, 112, 115

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusivelicense to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020S. Wilson, Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Film,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39153-9

135

136 INDEX

Collecting, 13, 15, 28, 38, 52–54, 65,67, 68, 76, 100, 105

methodology, 14, 52, 67Contemplation. See Environmental

aestheticsCriticismof tourists, 11

DDennis, John, 27, 45Diggle, Elizabeth, 12, 13, 24, 25,

36–40, 42, 47, 48, 64, 124

EEdinburgh, 36, 80Enclosure laws, 29, 46, 79, 82England, 26, 30, 36, 37, 39, 41, 63,

68, 78, 79, 82, 85, 91, 102, 106,108, 110, 112

Environmental aesthetics, 3, 58, 124

FFalls of Clyde, 36, 78, 87FilmsAgricultural and Highland Shows

(1928), 122Amateur Golf Championship St

Andrews (1930), 122Argaty and Nairn, 1934 (1934),

106Argaty People and Places (1928),

122Argaty Scenes 1932 (1932), 108Cart Horse Show (1928), 122Clay Pigeon Shooting (1934), 122Doune Show, Argaty Thro’ the Year

(1929), 122Early Days in 1930 (1930), 108Family at Nairn (1927), 122

The Family at Nairn, 1933 (1933),122

Family at Overdale and Nairn,1929 (1929), 107

Glasgow and the Clyde Coast(1909), 88

Holiday Scenes at Rothesay (1921),14, 90

In the Scottish Highlands (1908),65, 88, 122

Kate Kennedy Parade No. 1.(1929), 120, 122

Kate Kennedy Parade No. 2.(1928), 120, 122

Montgomery Family Holidays(1930), 120, 122

Montgomery Family-New House(1934), 122

Montgomery Family Outings (1930),112, 113, 120, 122

Penniwells and St. Andrews (1928),120, 122

Rocky Shore (1896), 57Rough Sea at Dover (1895), 70Rough Sea at Ramsgate (1896), 57Town Council Election Day (1929),

118, 122Visit to Glassingall (1929), 106,

107, 122The Waterfalls of Wales (1904), 70,

122Frame, 3, 4, 5, 9, 38, 42, 43, 45,

66, 106, 108, 112, 113, 115,125–127. See also Cavell, Stanley;Environmental aesthetics

GGaudreault, André. See IntermedialityGazescenic, 3, 8, 11, 114, 129second, 15, 116, 129

INDEX 137

tourist’s, 2, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 62,65, 67, 90, 91, 106, 108, 116,129, 130

Gerard, Alexander, 45Girvan, 85Glasgow, 19, 36, 60, 76, 81, 82, 84,

86–90Glasgow Fair, 14, 76, 82–86, 91, 93,

102Grand Tour, 7, 26, 28, 30, 36, 43.

See also ToursGreen, George, 86, 87, 90Greenock, 78, 87Guidebook, 2, 7, 10, 12, 13, 23,

24, 30, 31, 36, 40, 42, 51–54,59, 66, 107, 117, 124. Seealso Diggle, Elizabeth; Travelwriting; Wordsworth, Dorothy;Wordsworth, William

Gunning, Tom, 69, 71, 89, 94, 126,131

HHepburn, Ronald, W., 4, 17. See also

Environmental aestheticsHepworth, Cecil. See Hepworth

Manufacturing CompanyHepworth Manufacturing Company,

69, 89Heritageas tourist attractions, 7, 76, 78

Highlands, 10, 25, 35, 36, 42, 60,61, 64, 66, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87,88, 105, 106, 130

clearances, 79Home Tour, 24, 30, 37, 38, 42, 43,

125. See also Tours

IIdentity, 11, 12, 15, 16, 25, 30, 39,

53, 55, 67, 68, 77, 104, 105,109, 114, 118, 126, 130

national, 7, 9, 30, 38, 43, 44, 105,118, 130

spatial, 2, 9, 13, 15, 52, 77, 78, 80,91, 100, 103, 114, 129

Immersion. See Environmentalaesthetics

Industrialisation, 13, 43, 105, 118Ingold, Tim, 53, 54, 68, 69Intermediality, 12, 56Isle of Harris, 63Isle of Lewis, 63, 64

KKyles of Bute, 78

LLake District, 30, 35, 61, 78Lefebvre, Martin, 8, 18Leisure, 2, 3, 11, 15, 29, 30, 43, 52,

59, 60, 62, 76–78, 80, 84, 88,91, 92, 99, 100, 104, 106, 111,114

travel, 2, 3, 6–8, 13–15, 28, 29, 31,39, 53, 55, 59, 61, 68, 75, 76,78, 79, 82, 84, 87–91, 100,102, 116, 119, 125

Local topical film, 10, 76, 102, 104Loch Katrine, 60, 80, 81, 87Loch Lomond, 36, 40, 60, 80, 81, 87Lorimer, Hayden, 18, 19, 53, 54,

68, 69, 104, 119, 120. See alsoCollecting

Low, Rachel, 55, 69. See also Scenic,film

Lund, Katrin, 53, 54, 68, 69, 87, 94.See also Collecting

138 INDEX

MMaltby, Richard, 19McKernan, Luke, 59, 70, 71McNeil, Kenneth, 19, 63, 64, 67, 71,

72highlandism, 63

Mitchell & Kenyon, 70, 89, 94Modernisation. See IndustrialisationModernity, 86, 105, 117Moffat, 85Montgomery, Frances H., 15, 100,

105, 110–118, 120, 125. See alsoAmateur, filmmaking

Munro. See MunroistMunroist, 53

NNairn, 106, 108Nation, 13, 52, 59, 61, 67, 68, 103.

See also IdentityNature appreciation, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11,

12, 15, 16, 29, 44, 52, 55, 57,66, 104, 110, 112, 113, 116,117, 123, 124, 129, 130. See alsoEnvironmental aesthetics

Norris Nicholson, Heather. SeeAmateur, filmmaking

PPalace Picture House, 14, 90Panoramas, 7, 13, 60, 64, 69, 86Paul, R.W., 54, 57Photography, 2, 7, 8, 13, 44, 57, 77,

127Picturesque, 6, 12, 24, 30–33, 38, 39,

42, 43, 52, 56, 57, 60–62, 66,77, 88, 103, 104, 108, 109, 120,124, 130. See also Environmentalaesthetics

RRamblers Association, 78Rigney, Ann, 77, 92Rothesay, 7, 14, 60, 76, 84, 87–90Rural communities, 76, 82, 105

SScenic. See also Gaze; Toursfilm, 3, 10, 13, 14, 44, 55, 57–60,

76, 77, 87, 102, 104, 127genre, 3, 11, 52, 55–57, 59, 76,

88–90, 101, 112, 114, 124,125, 129

tours, 10, 11, 57, 59, 112Scott, Sir Walter, 10, 36, 61, 63, 68,

72Scottish Mountaineering Club, 81Screen, 9, 67, 90, 104, 106, 114,

126–129. See also Cavell, Stanley;Frame

Space, 2, 3, 4–10, 13, 14, 16, 24,27, 28, 33–35, 37–39, 42, 44,52–56, 58, 63–67, 77, 78, 80–82,86–88, 90–92, 99–102, 105,107–110, 112–118, 124–127,129–131. See also Environmentalaesthetics; Frame

Spectatorship, 8, 10, 16, 35, 52, 67,70, 81, 91, 114, 117, 125, 129

models, 3, 6, 7, 9, 24, 53, 54, 68,103, 107, 108, 117, 126

Sponsored film, 11, 13, 125St. Andrews, 100, 110, 112Stirling, 36, 64Sublime, 6, 8, 10, 12, 24, 27, 28,

31, 33, 34, 36, 38–40, 42, 44,52, 56, 57, 60–62, 65, 70, 77,103, 104, 108, 109, 112, 124,130, 131. See also Environmentalaesthetics

INDEX 139

TTaste, 5, 25, 26, 28, 31, 129

Thomas Cook, 85

Tours, 10, 24, 30, 36, 42, 43, 53, 59,78, 130

cinema, 3, 10, 12, 91, 117

motor, 109, 110, 112

walking, 12, 24, 29, 33, 42–44, 78

Tourism

domestic, 2, 29, 30, 32, 83, 124

international, 9

transborder, 9, 23

Tourist. See Gaze; Tours

Travel. See Access; Tourism; Tours

Travelogue film, 10, 127

Travel writing, 12, 23, 37, 40,41, 101, 124, 125. See alsoGuidebook

UUrban, Charles, 13, 14, 52, 53,

59–61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 88.See also Charles Urban TradingCompany

Uricchio, William, 18, 58, 70, 117,121, 131

Urry, John, 2, 7, 11, 15–20, 92, 94,116. See also Gaze

WWalker, William, 87, 94Walking, 13, 14, 29, 35, 43, 44, 53,

81, 82, 113. See also Toursexcursive, 34, 42–44

Wemyss Bay, 88Wordsworth, Dorothy, 12, 13, 24, 25,

36, 40–42, 48, 64, 68, 71, 124Wordsworth, William, 12, 17, 31–33,

36, 40, 41, 46, 47, 128Work. See Class; Leisure