Ùr-sgeul/earth-story: an artistic exploration of pennant’s hebrides and shieling culture 19th June 2025
Thursday 19 June 2025, 14:00 – 17:30
An Talla Mòr, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.
In the summer of 1772, Welsh naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726–98) embarked on a Voyage to the Hebrides. His lively, detailed account of the journey, published two years later, was a best-seller, exerting a lasting influence on how people saw—and visited—the Scottish Gàidhealtachd. It became a milestone in 18th century travel writing about Scotland, and especially the Highlands, despite its 20th century eclipse by Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). But Johnson, like many later travellers, was following in Thomas Pennant’s footsteps. Pennant didn’t travel alone: he was accompanied by a team including Gaelic-speaking scholarly guides, expert botanists, and a superb artist, Moses Griffith. His narrative is richly layered, containing many voices, drawing heavily upon local knowledge of a Gaelic world in the throes of a profound social and cultural crisis, rather than just representing the superficial perspective of a passing traveller.
The AHRC-funded Curious Travellers 2 project is currently preparing a groundbreaking new digital edition of Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides 1772, Part 1, alongside his other Scottish and Welsh Tours. The text, edited by Nigel Leask, is fully annotated, with collations of the 1774, 1776 and 1790 editions, and including the complete illustrations, as well as relevant appendices. It will be published on the Curious Travellers Website in 2026, to mark the tercentenary of Pennant’s birth.
On 19th June 2025, in partnership with Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Curious Travellers held an afternoon workshop of interdisciplinary talks, discussion, and song, focused upon and celebrating Pennant’s important account of his visit to Skye in July and August 1772. Historical, ethnographical, archaeological, environmental and musical perspectives combined to shed a unique light on Pennant’s writing about Skye and the Gaelic world that he encountered. The Workshop was introduced by Professor Mary-Ann Constantine (University of Wales Trinity St David, PI of Curious Travellers 2) and Dr Abigail Burnyeat, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, UHI: speakers were Professor Michael Given, University of Glasgow; Professor Nigel Leask, University of Glasgow; Dr Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig; and Maighread Stiùbhart, a renowned Gaelic singer from Lewis, who is currently undertaking doctoral research at the University of Glasgow. Maighread’s keynote concluded the afternoon with a powerful response in Gaelic song and spoken word to Pennant’s account of the Hebrides. The afternoon concluded with a lively discussion opened to the floor, after which participants and members of the audience joined together for dinner at nearby An Crùb café and restaurant.
The workshop coincided with the launch of Skye artist Eilidh Mackenzie’s exhibition Ùr-sgeul /Earth-Story at the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre, Portree, in partnership with ATLAS Arts and High Life Highland Archive Service, which ran from 20th June – 29th August 2025. Eilidh was invited to take part in an artist residency with ATLAS Arts in 2024, supported by the Curious Travellers project and Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. Responding to Pennant’s account in his Voyage to the Hebrides, Eilidh mapped various shielings across Skye (of which there are hundreds), drawing connections between the material culture, songs, and ecological significance of these places. She comments: ‘There feels a powerful connectedness through place, stone and soil to generationspast, and at the same time an overwhelming sense of cultural loss;the loss of indigenous knowledge and culture, of sounds and language of place, a way of seeing and being that was shaped entirely by the land. In terms of physical proximity you can’t get any closer than where I sit to the shieling culture that has otherwise disappeared – but in the time that has passed between the last milking and my curiosity, almost everything else around this place is changed. You need to be motivated to go deeper and look harder to find out about the history, heritage, culture, language, stories or music of a place, and it is the case that these are aspects of place that are not always of interest to visitors.’
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Programme:
14:00 – Introduction: Curious Travellers at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
Prof. Mary-Ann Constantine, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, and Dr Abigail Burnyeat, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.
14:15 – ‘Editing Thomas Pennant’s Account of the Isle of Skye in Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772’.
Prof. Nigel Leask, University of Glasgow
Pennant spent nine days touring the Isle of Skye in July 1772, accompanied by his party of savants and his artist Moses Griffith. His 29-page description of Skye, at the time of his visit suffering the effects of rack-renting, famine and emigration, is one of the high points of his Voyage to the Hebrides. It is no ordinary traveller’s description, but rather a collation of historical, geographical and ethnographic information derived from a wide range of sources, especially from Gaelic scholar John Stuart of Luss, and Kilmuir antiquarian Donald MacQueen. Although he has little to say about shielings on Skye (compared to Jura, and other parts of the Gàidhealtachd), Pennant includes a superb description of a luadhadh (or women’s cloth-waulking party) at Coirechatachan. Exploring this account in relation to his source, a letter from Macqueen, my paper discussed the accompanying engraving by Moses Griffith, which shifts the scene to Talisker, noting the significant presence of the Stac an Fhùcadhair (‘the Waulker’s /Fuller’s Stack’) rising from Talisker Bay in the background. This exemplifies Pennant’s interweaving of Gaelic work songs, learned antiquarianism, and local Skye topography into a complex verbal and visual tapestry, deriving from, but inventively elaborating and adapting, indigenous sources.
14:45 – ‘Pennant and the Polycrisis: West Highland Tourism in an Environmental Disaster Zone, June to August, 1772’
Dr Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
Thomas Pennant’s voyage through the western Gàidhealtachd during summer 1772 coincided with some of the most severe and challenging weather experienced there for more than seven decades. The prolonged climate crisis, beginning in 1769, brought successive harvest failures, economic collapse, widespread subsistence crises, and a wave of epidemics. The catastrophe was intensified by the economic prosperity of the previous decade, during which rising cattle prices had encouraged landlords to impose substantial rent increases across the region. These circumstances led to a financial collapse, profound social tensions, and widespread disaffection, thus sparking mass transatlantic emigration. This paper examines Pennant’s tour within the context of the ‘environmental polycrisis’ engulfing the region, drawing in particular upon contemporary Gaelic songs which reveal popular perceptions of and responses to the unprecedented catastrophe.
15:45 – Soil, Weeds, Grass, Cows
Prof. Michael Given, University of Glasgow
In July 1772 Thomas Pennant and his team rode north from Uig and admired Kilmuir, the ‘granary of Skie’. This included the rich soil and busy settlement of Greaulainn. Soil analysis of the kailyards of Greaulainn in the 1990s and investigating historical documents and the remains still visible today show the care and labour that people put into nourishing and tending this soil with manure, seaweed and lots of hard work with the caschrom or foot-plough. Outsiders such as journalist Robert Somers in 1847 were critical of the ‘ditches chokefull of weeds’, but these plants were important for food, fodder, medicine and textiles, particularly in times of famine. The people of Greaulainn carefully noted when the grass that grew round the well-dunged shielings up on the moor was ripe enough in late spring for the cows, and moved their cattle around to avoid overgrazing. Grass was also important for making string and fishing nets. Pennant and his team of naturalists observed the landscape and listened to local inhabitants more carefully than many visitors. A wider investigation of archaeological and historical sources and the landscape itself shows local people’s impressive local knowledge, attentiveness and thought for the future.
16:15 – Not Curious Enough? The Shieling System: On the Periphery of the Travel Writer’s Gaze, but Preserved in Gaelic Song
Maighread Stiùbhart, University of Glasgow
This paper expressed a personal disappointment that early travellers such as Burt, Pennant, Johnson, whilst they observed the Highland shieling system, largely underestimated its cultural and economic importance to Highland communities. The summer pastures and temporary dwellings were occupied mainly by families or milkmaids and shepherds who tended their milking livestock, in what had once been a vital part of Highland culture. Yet Pennant, who had encountered shielings and shieling folk, offered only the briefest of glimpses into that lifestyle; Johnson, arriving in September, missed the shieling season altogether; and Burt, though slightly more detailed, wrote in his characteristically patronising tone. It is also striking that Pennant’s adviser, the Rev. John Stuart, a Gaelic scholar and publisher of Donnchadh Bàn Macintyre’s poetry, whose knowledge extended from language to the natural world, did not awaken in Pennant a greater curiosity about the content of Gaelic song, given the bàrd’s renowned depictions of nature in Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (In Praise of Ben Dorain). The presentation combined visual material, historical commentary and the live performance of Gaelic songs that vividly reflect shieling culture. It concluded with Macintyre’s Cead Deireannach nam Beann (The Last Farewell to the Hills), composed after his final visit to his beloved Beinn Dòbhrain in 1802. This poignant song is not only a farewell to the mountains but to a disappearing way of life, the àirigh and the people whose work and voices once animated it. The fleeting nature of the travellers’ gaze contrasts sharply with the depth of what was lived, loved and remembered by the ordinary folk whose world they passed through, rather than by the parish ministers, gentry and nobility who hosted them; but what the travel journals overlooked, Gaelic tradition has preserved.
