This is an account by Dorothy Wordsworth of a six week tour she made with her poet brother north of the border from their Lake District home in the late summer of 1803. They were accompanied by fellow poet Coleridge for part of the way, though he seems to have been ill most of the time, and before long went his own way in greater comfort. Dorothy's poetic descriptions of the Scottish countryside will ring familiar to anyone who has read her more famous Grasmere Journal, and the landscape has many similarities. Dorothy's descriptions of the many sub-standard inns they stay in along the way are quite amusing and show how much poorer and bleaker the Scottish countryside was at this time than most parts of England. Towards the end of the tour they spend time with Walter Scott, at this time also a fellow poet, and not the prolific novelist he would become better known for later. The first half of this account was written contemporaneously, while the latter half suffers slightly from having been written up at a later date, somewhat lacking the detail and fluency of the earlier sections. A good read, though. ( )

"Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803" (1874) is travel literature by Dorothy Wordsworth about a six-week, 663-mile journey through the Scottish Highlands starting on August 15th 1803 with her brother William Wordsworth and mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, all important authors in the burgeoning Romanticism movement. The trip itinerary was in part a literary pilgrimage to the places associated with Romantic Scottish figures Robert Burns, Ossian, William Wallace and contemporary Sir Walter Scott. She wrote Recollections for family and friends and never saw it published in her lifetime. Some have called it "undoubtedly her masterpiece", and one of the best Scottish travel literature accounts during a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries which saw 100s of such examples. It is often compared as a Romantic counterpart to the Enlightenment-era "A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland" (1775) by Samuel Johnson written about 27 years earlier.

The edition I read is by Carol Kyros Walker (1997) of Yale University Press who re-traced Dorothy's path through Scotland taking 100's of beautiful B&W pictures along the way, including a detailed map - reading this edition was very much a multi-media experience with the base text by Dorothy, the map, the pictures and the footnotes - it's hard to imagine a better way to read an old travel book. One of the interesting themes of the book is the "picturesque" which was an aesthetic style in vogue at the time, a way of looking at the landscape first described by William Gilpin. The concept of picturesque is often difficult to understand and describe, I recommend reading the Wikipedia article on the topic before reading this book, to see and understand how and why she describes things the way she does - in the end the reader will have a primary source appreciation of what picturesque means. Indeed it was the picturesque that inspired touristic tendencies in Scotland during that period. ( )