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Thomas Pennant, of Downing, Flintshire, was a Welsh-born naturalist who wrote a number of important books, and his travels in North Wales played an important role in creating a visual awareness of Snowdonia. His Journey to Snowdon (1781) became an important source of information for visitors and artists alike. It set the standard for subsequent travel books and published tour accounts. In this article, I show the significance of the illustrated book, A Tour in Wales, by Pennant, for the establishment of mountain viewpoints in Snowdonia.

This short concluding chapter reflects on the work of an ongoing collaborative academic project focused on the C18th home tour. Curious Travellers could be described as a ‘crucible’ project—a space in which different media, different perspectives, and different research skills combine and collide. Currently funded by the AHRC, it is a digital humanities project involving TEI tagging and crowd-sourcing, but its foundation is archival research into manuscripts. It is focused through the influential Tours of Wales and Scotland published by the naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant, yet it seeks to unpick the multiple voices and collaborations behind his texts and to explore their legacy in the journeys and texts of others. The creation of new editions continues to generate new topics and research questions, including Anglophone/Celtic-language interactions; the writings of women tourists; the role of material objects (specimens and souvenirs) and of visual culture in knowledge exchange and production. Increasingly, project researchers are relating their work to broader global contexts of colonialism and environmental history. The diversity of the genre has proved hugely stimulating for a range of audiences beyond academia: community engagement and creative practices have been a key feature from the start. There are, of course, challenges—practical, methodological, financial. This reflective piece will acknowledge the constraints, as well as the possibilities, of being multi-stranded, cross-disciplinary—and intermittently funded.

In 1806, Charles Fothergill, a young man with a strong interest in natural history, set out on a seven-month tour of Orkney and Shetland. His goal was to write a book about the islands that would emulate the work produced by the earlier traveller Thomas Pennant on Wales and mainland Scotland. Despite his ambition, Fothergill never succeeded in completing his book. His surviving manuscripts, which range from a rough working journal covering one part of his journey to some comments on botany that seem ready to go to press, suggest some of the difficulties that he might have found both in constructing a coherent narrative of his travels and in recreating a version of Pennant’s antiquarian and scientific travels at a time when tastes in travel writing were shifting to focus more on the pleasures of landscape and aesthetics.

Simons reflects on the stay of naturalist and writer Thomas Pennant at Gothurst House in Buckingshire, England that was once occupied by the Digbys. He mentions that Pennant engaged in a scandal after he mis-identify the portraits of Sir Kenelm Digby despite the name John Digby which is written on the reverse. The subject was given the same erroneous name in a watercolour record of the painting, executed around 1806-22 and it thus remains mis-identified in the catalogue of its repository. Finally, a version of the painting itself survives Everard Digby. He notes that Pennant's thoughts on the painting were read widely and circulated broadly, repeated verbatim but in shorter form in 1801.

The essay investigates the work of the Welsh natural historian Thomas Pennant from 1752 up to his 1765 tour of Continental Europe and the completed publication of his first major scientific work, British Zoology , a year later. It focuses thereby on a time when Pennant actively sought correspondences with naturalists within Britain and abroad and created an extensive network that included figures such as Benjamin Stillingfleet, Emanuel Mendes da Costa, and Carl Linnaeus. Working with rich metadata drawn from Pennant’s correspondence, the essay seeks to gain a deeper understanding of how the epistolary medium fed into his scientific oeuvre and contributed to establishing his name on the Continent as a British virtuoso of the highest rank. Light is thrown on the etiquette and practicalities of specimen exchange against the backdrop of European wars, the roles played by British and European learned societies, and the importance of book exchange, including the effort to expand the boundaries of knowledge through the acquisition of new publications.

John Lightfoot's account of lichens in Flora Scotica was the first Scottish lichen Flora and as such it was novel in several respects: 1) it was published in English; 2) it drew on the knowledge and expertise of several key local collectors and treated lichens from alpine areas for the first time; 3) it made lichens accessible in providing Linnaean binomials, colloquial English, and frequently also Gaelic names, together with lively descriptions, details of ecology, and medicinal or traditional uses when these were known. Of the 117 taxa listed, 109 were classified in the genus Lichen, five in Byssus, two in Mucor and one in Fucus. Nineteen taxa were newly described, of which five are still in current use. John Lightfoot's life, work and botanical friendships are also briefly discussed.

Spring returns and with it the birds. But it also brings throngs of birders who emerge, binoculars in hand, to catch a glimpse of a rare or previously unseen species or to simply lay eyes on a particularly fine specimen of a familiar type. In a delightful meditation that unexpectedly ranges from the Volga Delta to Central Park and from Charles Dickens's Hard Times to a 1940s London burlesque show, Jeremy Mynott ponders what makes birds so beautiful and alluring to so many people. Princeton Shorts are brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in ebook format. Providing unmatched insight into important contemporary issues or timeless passages from classic works of the past, Princeton Shorts enable you to be an instant expert in a world where information is everywhere but quality is at a premium.

His misapprehension has led to confusion for more than two centuries about the precise whereabouts of arguably the holiest of Welsh religious sites. Even modern writers perpetuate the notion that it is to be found below high-water mark. It is not. The lower of two ancient paths scored across the green southern slope of Trwyn Maen Melyn will, in its \"circuitous and most hazardous\" way, lead you there. The path is worn down to gravel in places and lichens that had spread across steps carved in the rock have likewise been scuffed away by the passage of modern pilgrim feet.

In 1977 one female bird was identified as the source for all UK kites, so small was the breeding stock. Today the red kite is a rare success story in British conservation. Twenty years ago Spanish birds were introduced into the Chilterns - 500 breeding pairs are there now. In Wales, from having \"survived as a beleaguered remnant in a remote part\" (in the words of ornithologist Leslie Brown), it's an everyday sight in the hills. I've even seen one scavenging between stalls at Machynlleth's market - a sight that would have delighted the late Bill Condry, a Guardian Country diarist and champion of the red kite.