A prolific author, Thomes Pennant's great passion for natural history and the publication of his three volume magnum opus "British Zoology" in 1761 had already brought him membership of the Royal Society and fame, by the time he began the work for which he is now remembered - his two great tours of Scotland and the north of England. Pennant was to write the seminal work of the 18th century. His writing is one of the first major accounts of the Highlands after the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Pennant's work is more than simply a topography of the country, but represents a desire to introduce a land which was very much "terra incognita" to a southern audience. Although a Hanoverian, it is a measure of his balance and judgement that his writings about a land so recently hostile to that dynasty are so fair and scrupulous. The acutness and range of his observation is almost without parallel for the time, and his work is an invaluable mine of information on the history, tradition, customs and geography of North Britain on the edge of vast and irrevocable change.

Observations on the principal cities, ports and geographical features, customs, manners, and inhabitants of early eighteenth-century Britain