"Nearest Approach to Fairyland": Mythologising Scotland in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh Periodical Travel-Writing and Tourism Advertisements

Abstract:This article investigates descriptions of the Scottish landscape in travel writing and tourism advertisements published in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine from 1800 to 1900. Its main objective is to analyze the ways in which periodical nature writing simultaneously created a vicarious interaction with the countryside for the reader and revealed the effects that increased human presence had on the land. The essay shows how the creation of landscape narratives without a distinct narrator came to contribute to the interplay between the mythologized, untouched Scottish countryside and the physical land that was steadily changing as a result of human interference.