Newcastle University

Travel

During the Eighteenth Century, travel opportunities had been limited. It had been expensive, slow, and dangerous, as well as restricted by wars. Between 1785 and 1790, routes across Britain were expanded and improved. The defeat of Napoleon and the subsequent peace achieved by the Holy Alliance (Austria, Britain, France, Prussia and Russia) at the signing of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 effectively removed many European impediments to travel.

Thus people in the Romantic Age had more opportunity to travel than ever before. The Romantics also developed new aesthetic approaches to appreciating Nature, as well as a taste for the historical and for 'authentic' experience. All these factors contributed to making the period one in which an increasing number of people both travelled and became enthusiastic consumers of travel accounts and journals.

Not only did European travel become more popular, but also journeys within Britain. Walter Scott's poems and novels, such as The Lady of the Lake (1810) and Rob Roy (1818), encouraged travel northward, to Scotland.
The Border region, too, became more popular as a place to visit, as numerous travel guides and journals, with such titles as A Tour through the Northern Counties of England and the Borders of Scotland (1802), or The Border Tour throughout the most important and interesting places in the Counties of Northumberland, Berwick, Roxburgh and Selkirk (1826), testify.

At the same time, publications like Wilson's Historical, Traditionary, and Imaginative Tales of the Borders and of Scotland with an Illustrative Glossary of the Scottish Dialect (1804-1835) tried to capture the regional identity of the borders and point to an existing interest in its traditions.