'Enlightenment Travel and British Identities' is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the influential eighteenth-century travel-writer, antiquarian and naturalist, Thomas Pennant (1726-1798). Offering a truly multidisciplinary range of perspectives, it explores the complex networks of informants who helped Pennant undertake and write-up the journeys behind his widely-read Welsh and Scottish 'Tours'.

Mary-Ann Constantine is Reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. The author of The Truth against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (2007), Constantine has written widely on the Romantic period in Wales and Brittany.

Nigel Leask is Regius Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow as well as a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is the author of Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (2010), which won the Saltire Prize for best research monograph in 2010.

List of Figures; List of Contributors; Preface; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction: Thomas Pennant, Curious Traveller, Mary- Ann Constantine and Nigel Leask; Chapter 1. 'A Round Jump from Ornithology to Antiquity': The Development of Thomas Pennant's Tours, R. Paul Evans; Part I. History, Antiquities, Literature; Chapter 2. Thomas Pennant: Some Working Practices of an Archaeological Travel Writer in Late Eighteenth- Century Britain, C. Stephen Briggs; Chapter 3. Heart of Darkness: Thomas Pennant and Roman Britain, Mary- Ann Constantine; Chapter 4. Constructing Identities in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Pennant and the Early Medieval Sculpture of Scotland and England, Jane Hawkes; Chapter 5. Shaping a Heroic Life: Thomas Pennant on Owen Glyndwr, Dafydd Johnston; Chapter 6. 'The First Antiquary of His Country': Robert Riddell's Extra- Illustrated and Annotated Volumes of Thomas Pennant's Tours in Scotland, Ailsa Hutton and Nigel Leask; Chapter 7. 'A Galaxy of the Blended Lights': The Reception of Thomas Pennant, Elizabeth Edwards; Part II. Natural History and the Arts; Chapter 8. 'As If Created by Fusion of Matter after Some Intense Heat': Pioneering Geological Observations in Thomas Pennant's Tours of Scotland, Tom Furniss; Chapter 9. Geological Landscape as Antiquarian Ruin: Banks, Pennant and the Isle of Staffa, Allison Ksiazkiewicz; Chapter 10. Pennant, Hunter, Stubbs and the Pursuit of Nature, Helen McCormack; Chapter 11. Pennant's Legacy: The Popularization of Natural History in Nineteenth- Century Wales through Botanical Touring and Observation; Caroline R. Kerkham; Short Bibliography of Thomas Pennant's Tours in Scotland and Wales; Index.