This study, exploring a broad range of evocative Irish travel writing from 1850 to 1914, much of it highly entertaining and heavily laced with irony and humour, draws out interplays between tourism, travel literature and commodifications of culture. It focuses on the importance of informal tourist economies, illicit dimensions of tourism, national landscapes, ‘legend’ and invented tradition in modern tourism.

This study, exploring a broad range of evocative Irish travel writing from 1850 to 1914, much of it highly entertaining and heavily laced with irony and humour, draws out interplays between tourism, travel literature and commodifications of culture. It focuses on the importance of informal tourist economies, illicit dimensions of tourism, national landscapes, 'legend' and invented tradition in modern tourism.

This study, exploring a broad range of evocative Irish travel writing from 1850 to 1914, much of it highly entertaining and heavily laced with irony and humour, draws out interplays between tourism, travel literature and commodifications of culture. It focuses on the importance of informal tourist economies, illicit dimensions of tourism, national landscapes, ‘legend’ and invented tradition in modern tourism.

Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland perceived by British visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not fit their ideas of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. The rituals of Irish Catholicism, the lamentations of funeral wakes, the Irish language they could not comprehend, even the landscapes were all strange to tourists from England, Wales, and Scotland. Overlooking the acute despair in England’s own industrial cities, these travelers opined in their writings that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated moral failures of the Irish character.

This volume offers a reasoned critical account of a wide range of travel writing about rural Ireland. The focus is on work by English travellers who visited Ireland for pleasure, from the ’scenic tourists’ of the post-Romantic period to Eric Newby in the 1980s. Ryle also discusses accounts by American and English anthropologists, as well as writing by Irish authors including J.M. Synge, George Moore, Sean O’Faolain and Colm Tóibín. The materials reviewed and discussed here, including many books which are now difficult to find, offer illuminating and sometimes entertaining evidence about the development of tourism. Ryle also shows how the discourses and practices of pleasurable travel have intersected with and been marked by the dimensions of power and proprietorship, hegemony, and resistance, which have characterised Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English cultural relations over the last two centuries. Journeys in Ireland will interest all those concerned with the literature and history of those relations, and will be an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers and students concerned with travel writing and tourism with and beyond these islands.

That Ireland is picturesque is a well-worn cliché, but little is understood of how this perception was created, painted, and manipulated during the long 18th century. This book positions Ireland at the core of the picturesque's development and argues for a far greater degree of Irish influence on the course of European landscape theory and design. Positioned off-axis from the greater force-field, and off-shore from mainland Europe and America, where better to cultivate the oblique perspective? This book charts the creation of picturesque Ireland, while exploring in detail the role and reach of landscape painting in the planning, publishing, landscaping and design of Ireland's historic landscapes, towns, and tourist routes. Thus it is also a history of the physical shaping of Ireland as a tourist destination, one of the earliest, most calculated, and most successful in the world. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This is the third revision of this seminal work. Co-authored by original author Frank Mitchell and now Michael Ryan, the result is a stunning collaboration between masters giving all the elements of the original book, modified, updated and further enhanced by the inclusion of a new narrative of Irish archaeology from the Stone Age to the Norman Invasion. Together they have successfully undertaken the daunting task of giving in one book the story of the shaping of the land from the beginning of time until now, by all tbe varying forces of nature, sea, climate, man and machine. The story takes in the shaping of the crust, the movement of glaciers, the first men and their primitive agriculture, their buildings and their effect on the forests, the growth of bogs, new migrations, the rise of the monasteries of the Early Christians and the castles of conquest, the devastation of war, urban growth, modern agriculture and afforestation, all set against the backdrop of the landscape, arguably one Ireland's most precious resources.