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Volcanic Geotourism in West Coast Scotland 261

Figure 18.3 The cultural filter in landscape tourism

their wildness and ruggedness solicited viewers’ awe cover the cost of the available but rather limited
and wonder. William Wordsworth suggested it was transport and accommodation) and requisite
‘the result of Nature’s first great dealings with the education. It was only with the arrival of the
superficies of the earth’ (Wordsworth, 1835, p35). It passenger railways that opportunities for, especially
was an all-embracing movement, influential from coastal, excursions opened up the countryside for
around 1780 to 1850, involving viewers’ emotional the majority of the by then largely urban-based
reflections on landscapes and their evocation and population; until then, they had to just accept the
visualization by artists and writers. The three published second-hand observations and
movements reflected interrelated elements: accounts.
For much of the early development of
• travellers’ nature and purpose; landscape appreciation the dominant representa-
• meanings ascribed to, and understandings of, tions were provided by artists trained in Europe’s
natural phenomena; and major cultural centres working in pencil and ink,
• the shift from a rural agrarian to an urban oils and watercolour. Their originals were initially
industrial society and the concomitant rise of viewed by the social elite in commercial galleries
the middle-classes in numbers, education and and somewhat later in the emerging public art
influence. galleries by the middle classes in London,
Edinburgh and the major provincial centres;
An initial limiting factor in promoting tourism lithography’s 19th-century developments enabled
into wild landscapes was the physical difficulty of the mass printing of good-quality copies to be
access. Up to the late 19th century leisure travel seen by those unable by geography or social class
over any distance was restricted to the social elite to view the originals. Photography was increasingly
who had the available time, financial resources (to used as a recording medium from the late 19th

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