Pennant Tour of Scotland

Thomas Pennant was to write the seminal work of the eighteenth century. His writing is one of the first major accounts of the Highlands of Scotland fter the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Pennant's work is more than simply a topography of the country, but represents a desire to introduce a land which was very much terra incognita to a southern audience. Although a Hanoverian, it is a measure of his balance and judgement that his writings about a land so recently hostile to that dynasty are so fair and scrupulous. The acutness and range of his observation is almost without parallel for the time, and his work is an invaluable mine of information on the history, tradition, customs and geography of North Britain on the edge of vast and irrevocable change. A Tour in Scotland, 1769.