Landscapes on the move: The travel journals of Celia Fiennes (1685-c.1712)

Abstract

This paper takes a fresh look at Celia Fiennes' account of her tour of England, Wales and Scotland, at the end of the seventeenth century. Travelling on horseback, and sometimes on foot, Fiennes recounted her experiences of journeying through the country, commenting on the physical qualities and characteristics of the landscapes she moved through, together with local customs, industrial and agricultural processes, and places of curiosity and note. This paper explores Fiennes’ sensory immersion in the landscapes she rode through, and her awe and wonder at the interactions of natural and human processes in the continuous work of making landscapes. Her writing provides not only an insight into the meanings of landscape as a visual experience but importantly the ways in which landscape is emergent through all of the senses - sight, sound, taste, touch, feeling - and in the imagination and memory. Rather than dipping in to her text for passages that serve to illustrate a point on a specific subject such as regional culinary traditions or sightseeing, this paper is interested in the work in its entirety, for offering an invaluable first-hand account of the texture of landscape at the close of the seventeenth century.