Sean Harris is visual artist and animator, commissioned by the Curious Travellers 2 Project to make collaborative art based on Thomas Pennant’s works with the pupils of Ysgol y Llan in Whitford. Here he reflects on his long-running relationship with one of the most fascinating birds in Pennant’s Zoologies – the now-extinct Great Auk.

*****

How can we truthfully represent a being which lies beyond our lived experience? Or, for that matter, a creature which still inhabits our immediate sphere? This is a challenge that faced Thomas Pennant, traveller in external landscapes, and which I myself face today, as an artist engaged in more internalized forms of journeying. Pennant, it seems, had his struggles in the matter just as I do, and had readers very willing to point out his failures:

The British Zoology part the 2d. & another Copy for Mr. Tindale I have received. The figures are in general well done, but two very common Birds are so very ill executed that I fear it will bring a Discredit on the whole. These are the wood Pigeon or Ring Dove, & the Bull finch. They are not at all proportioned to the size of the natural Birds. The Wood Pigeon I thought a bird of Prey by its attitude, & could by no means guess what it was on account of its bulk. You will excuse my censuring freely what I think wrong in the work as I wish it well.

Daniel Lysons to Thomas Pennant, May 1764

Feedback, whilst valuable, can be vexing. Today, most people’s answer would be simply to pick up a camera or go online. And of course, we now have the very considerable advantage of being able to generate and source moving images. However, having dedicated the greater part of a career as a visual artist, animator, and filmmaker to the creation of works concerned with culturally resonant animals, I can categorically state that it’s not that straightforward. Try finding a photo – or clip – of the curlew, the horse, the salmon, the hyaena, the wild boar… that is to say, the image which all at once perfectly conveys the being’s form, its distinctive movement, its colour within an ever-shifting light field, its relationship with other beings; its meaning. What animals mean to us is a matter of cultural conditioning and always changing. Take the extinct Thylacine (or Tasmanian Tiger): once, to colonists, this was a snarling predator with a bounty on its head, but now in the post-colonial era it is a lonely being occupying still, silent spaces, evoking the twenty-first-century concept of the ‘Endling’.

I have an on-going preoccupation with another species of our rapidly growing necrofauna: the great auk. In my quest to ‘re-animate’ this icon of extinction, Thomas Pennant’s oeuvre has become an increasingly important way-marker. When in 1766 Pennant included the great auk (under the name ‘Penguin’) in the first, luxurious edition of British Zoology, it was still extant, albeit in significant decline: as a valuable resource which needed preserving, it had already been afforded legal protection. In this edition, the species is not awarded an illustration by Pennant, instead being solely represented by a somewhat brief verbal description.

In the same year Joseph Banks undertook the voyage to Newfoundland which was to make his name as a naturalist. Here, on the 7th/8th May he recorded ‘Penguins’ on the Grand Banks and apparently collected one in Chateau Bay, Labrador. Banks later lent Pennant many bird skins gathered in the course of the expedition – including the now-extinct ‘Eskimo curlew’: it may be that a great auk skin was among them. The nomenclatural revision evident in Pennant’s 1776 British Zoology – whereby the species is presented for the first time as the ‘GREAT AUK’ – might have been informed by a physical encounter with Banks’ specimen. If this was the case, it is not immediately apparent in the newly inserted illustration or the accompanying text, which still leans heavily on Martin Martin’s account of a 1697 journey to St. Kilda. The engraving, by Peter Paillou, is obviously derived from an earlier (1738) watercolour by Charles Collins which, in being rendered with such clarity, clearly references a very dead taxidermy specimen or skin. Presumably the engraving was commissioned so as to enable reproduction within the new more manageable (and marketable) British Zoology – though Paillou or his technician felt it unnecessary to reverse the image on the plate to remain faithful to Collins’ original (which is pragmatic but perhaps, speaking as a printmaker, a bit lazy). Both images share the rather strange quality of a bird that is somehow overlaid on its watery environment – rather than being immersed in it – in order to convey the anatomy of the specimen in its entirety.

This paddling bird stands apart from the overwhelming majority of great auk illustrations, which tend to show the species standing upright like a southern hemisphere penguin – as is the case in The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, with which Pennant was deeply familiar. There, it was represented by an engraving showing Ole Worm’s pet bird from the Faeroe Islands (1655). This vertically inclined depiction, perhaps rooted in the anthropomorphic appeal of both the penguin and great auk, does reflect the likely nature of more prolonged auk sightings on remote skerries. But it does not convey the reality of the great auk as a true ocean dweller, which spent the overwhelming majority of its annual cycle engaged in a bobbing migration on Atlantic currents.

At the time Pennant was assembling his Zoology the majority of encounters with the species beyond the slaughter grounds off Newfoundland would have been with birds in the water: the great auk only came onto land for a few weeks in the early summer to breed. Having undertaken his Scottish tours in the decade between the publication of the 1766 and 1776 editions of the Zoology, Pennant had certainly come closer to the coasts where it still lingered. It seems likely that anecdotal accounts concerning the bird and its behaviour might have brought it more immediately into his sphere of thought – and also influenced his choice of illustration. Though atypical amongst portrayals of the great auk, Pennant’s version – if one is seeking to distill the bird’s being into a single representative image – is probably closer to the truth than we are generally presented with.

My own animated work about the bird (which similarly draws on a diverse array of sources) seeks to convey the duality of the great auk: as both ‘auk-ward’ landlubber and vivacious and graceful torpedo capable of outpacing a boat rowed by many men. My birds also incubate in the horizontal position, reflecting ornithologist Tim Birkhead’s investigation of ‘brood patches’ – bald spots in the breast feathers for nestling the egg – in taxidermy specimens.

But what of the meaning of the bird?

Pennant’s overarching view of interspecies and Indigenous/colonial relations seems clearly articulated in his reflection (in Arctic Zoology) on the American bison and its relationship with Native American tribes. The latter group, he observes, ‘whilst at war with the animal creation…never thought of conquering those of the brute creation, and rendering them subservient to their will’. The (still undomesticated) American bison and the Plains tribes very narrowly escaped extinction – but the great auk and the Beothuks of Newfoundland did not. Their extirpation was precipitated, in the case of the auk, by the perception of them as little more than a floating pillow factory and drive-in fast food facility for North Atlantic sailors and whalers – and in the case of the Beothuk as a human obstacle to the ‘superior’ culture’s extractive objectives. In commenting thus on the relationship between ‘the savage’ and the bison, Pennant appears to express the enlightened agriculturalist’s paradigm of nature subjugated in order to maximise yield and thereby generate a surplus.

Nevertheless, Pennant’s great auk reflects an important marker in a paradigm shift precipitated by the realisation that a species could vanish; and therefore that a ‘resource’ could in fact become exhausted and disappear altogether. By the time John James Audubon – whose great auk pair, depicted in his Birds of America, provide the principal reference for my own ‘re-animated’ colony – set sail in search of a specimen in 1833, the species had long gone from Newfoundland and he had no option but to resort to taxidermy for reference.

Several decades later, in 1860, the Cambridge University zoologist Alfred Newton (who dismissed Audubon’s efforts as ‘a daub’) and John Wolley arrived in Iceland hoping to acquire a great auk specimen. But they were to leave with only an archive of memories, along with a record of the last human encounter with a breeding pair – a remarkable and (to us) brutally direct account of the moment when the anima of a species was snuffed out. The Garefowl Books – a collection of handwritten notes taken during interviews with the men who took the last auk pair – constitute an absorbing and thought-provoking memorial that has deeply informed my own work. This scrutiny of an archival source perhaps echoes Pennant’s reference throughout his work not just to matters of animal anatomy and behaviour, but to their contemporary cultural relevance and history. In this way, for me he stands not just as a naturalist, but as precursor to the best of modern nature writing.

For an animator the ‘truth’ of an animal’s being lies not so much in its form but in the nuances of its passage through time and space. Thus, the being is more adjective or verb than noun – perhaps in common with some Indigenous perspectives, where both nomenclature and taxonomy reflect the fleeting encounter in the landscape more than the minutiae of anatomy as observed in the skeleton or skin on the dissecting slab. A preoccupation with movement is intriguingly apparent in the Garefowl Books where many of the Icelanders’ descriptions of the great auk’s movement and behaviour are given via embodied mimesis – and the use of handy dead seabirds as puppets.

In a journey through the death and afterlife of the great auk, with Pennant as the point of embarkation, Wolley and Newton’s expedition marks the establishment of extinction as a recognised mechanism, and the emergence of conservation as a societal concept. Newton’s experiences in Iceland in pursuit of the remembered great auk surely influenced his lobbying for seabirds, which eventually led to the Sea Birds Preservation Act, 1869. Interestingly though, the law itself was apparently still more concerned with preserving seabirds as a warning system for sailors lost in the fog (a function Pennant refers to in his great auk entry) than for the good of the birds themselves. But nevertheless, the (to us) familiar concept of conservation was emerging with the inception of the Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889. And on the other side of the Atlantic, ‘The Auk’ was the name given to the journal of the American Ornithological Society, founded as the Ornithological Union in 1883.

To return, then, to the original question – how do we form a truthful depiction of a species which lies beyond lived experience? The answer apparently lies in journeying: through the literature, the mind and the physical world, gathering and then processing a diverse array of data. This is gathered not just from ‘science’, but from a variety of sources which we would now categorise as ‘history’, ‘anthropology’, ‘archaeology’ and ‘art’. Still somewhat blurred in Pennant’s time, the dividing lines between these disciplines hardened over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are slowly and uncertainly emerging from these silos, having realised that none of them in isolation can present the reliable and holistic universal truth that is needed to effect change.

It strikes me that Pennant and I, spurred on by curiosity and imagination, have (very simply) drawn on an array of memories, pictures and specimens, and curated them using the technologies available to us. Perhaps through this shared process a thread now connects us. His great auk has occupied the centre of my mind’s eye for some time now. Maybe in bringing it to life I will, at the same time, re-animate both the bird and a part of his mind.

*****

With thanks to Professor William Montevecchi, Memorial University (Newfoundland) and Professor Gísli Pálsson (Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Iceland) for the gifts of their books Newfoundland Birds: Exploitation, Study, Conservation and The Last Of Its Kind: The Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction respectively.

Alex Deans

The first illustration that a reader would find on opening the original edition of Thomas Pennant’s Tour of Scotland in 1769, is a tiny picture of the ancient Yew Tree at Fortingall, near Loch Tay in the Scottish Highlands. When he visited Fortingall, Pennant measured the Yew’s trunk at 56 feet in circumference. Still alive today—though much reduced in size­—the Fortingall Yew is thought to be between 3000 and 9000 years old. Along with descriptions of preserved tree trunks discovered in bogs, and relict woodlands of Scots Pine in the Highlands, the Fortingall Yew links Pennant’s Tour to a landscape far older than its author could have imagined.  

For Pennant, Scots Pine woods in particular offered a tantalising glimpse of a very different environment to that which existed in eighteenth-century Scotland: one populated by wolves, bears, beavers, and the giant, lion-maned cattle described by the sixteenth-century chronicler Hector Boece, whose writing inspired William Shakespeare’s ‘Tragedy of Macbeth’. The play famously ends with Macbeth’s enemies felling Birnam Wood and using the branches to screen their march upon his stronghold. Passing Birnam in 1769, Pennant dryly remarks that the wood ‘seems never to have recovered the march its ancestors made to Dunsinane’ (p. 74). A similar note of scepticism occurs when Pennant mentions the legendary Caledonian Forest, or Sylva Caledonia, again citing Boece: ‘It is very slightly mentioned by the antients; but the supposed extent is given by the Scottish historian.’ (p. 209)

It is now generally agreed that a warmer, wetter climate had begun reduce the extent of the Scotland’s boreal forests by 2000 BCE. Making his way through the south-west Highlands, Pennant writes that ‘the pine-forests are become very rare’, describing this leg of his tour as ‘truly melancholy, almost one continued scene of dusky moors, without arable land, trees, houses, or living creature, for numbers of miles.’ (p.183). But earlier in his journey, Pennant had visited thriving woods of Scots Pine in Deeside, Aberdeenshire, where he writes of ‘a distant view of hills over a surface of verdant pyramids of pines.’ (p.108)

Such passages seem to raise questions about the natural and human history of the landscape. Did the whole country look like this in the distant past? Hints of ancient woods contrasted with the mostly treeless landscape that Pennant observed on his travels in Scotland, suggesting the ways in which human activity had shaped the environment in centuries past, and the ways it could do so in the future. Indeed, many of the woodlands that most impressed Pennant during his Tour in Scotland 1769 were not natural at all, but the plantations and designed landscapes surrounding stately homes such as Taymouth Castle.

Scotland’s lack of mature trees became a traveller’s cliché in the eighteenth-century, thanks partly to Dr Samuel Johnson, who made his own tour of Scotland after Pennant in 1773, and memorably quipped that ‘A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice’.[1] It’s worth noting that Johnson here refers largely to Scotland’s east coast: ‘From the bank of the Tweed to St Andrews’—not that the Hebrides would do much to alter his opinion. Pennant had made a similar observation in his Tour in Scotland 1769 when he wrote of ‘a vast nakedness from the Humber, as far as the extremity of Caithness’ (p.14). Significantly, Pennant identifies this issue with a vast stretch of Britain’s coastal geography, rather than Scotland in particular.

It sometimes feels as if Pennant’s writing on Scotland’s trees (or lack thereof) brings together two competing eighteenth-century urges: a gentlemanly desire for a rational, productive landscape, and a naturalist’s curiosity for a wilder past, when ‘great part of our island was a meer waste, a tract of woods and fen’.[2] Pennant’s tours of Scotland show that he was deeply aware of what the absence of woodland meant for the wellbeing of both animals and people, and that he saw potential afforestation as a way of improving the landscape, regardless of what its ancient state might have been.

[1] Ronald Black (ed.), To the Hebrides: Samuel Johnson’s Tour of the Western Isles of Scotland and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2011), p.7.

[2] British Zoology (London: 1768),II, p.513

Stephanie Holt, Natural History Museum

The British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery is a whirlwind tour through the British Enlightenment, taking in objects of collection, science, art, and and the thinkers who defined the period’s intellectual achievements. The specimens within the collection, however, are not all owned by the British Museum, and many objects within the gallery are on loan from various institutions, including my own, the Natural History Museum.

An object on display within any exhibition is at an elevated risk of degradation, whether that is through light, jostling, vibration as people walk past cabinets, heat and humidity, or pest attack. And, of course, the risk of vandalism or theft is ever-present. This is all taken into account within modern exhibition design; well-made cabinets and digital monitoring all help to ensure the safety of specimens. However, regular hands-on inspection is the only way to be certain that objects are not degrading. Consequently, the Enlightenment Gallery is closed to the public two days a year for object inspection, and museums send curators to open the cabinets, and check on-loan specimens.

This year, due to the Curious Travellers project’s work on Thomas Pennant’s natural history collections, I was invited along to view the Pennant specimens on display in this collection. It has been several years since I was last in this gallery as a visitor, and I was surprised that I had forgotten just how much Pennant material is on view.

The exhibition is on display in one of the oldest parts of the Museum, the King’s Library (originally designed for King George III). As a result of the eighteenth-century style cabinetry, it takes more of a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ approach than one might find elsewhere in the museum. Specimens are displayed much as they might have been during the Enlightenment itself, albeit with modern interpretation addressing the important questions this collection raises regarding Eurocentricity within history, colonialism, and concepts of anti-slavery.

The first section of the gallery is devoted to the natural world, and specimens from Sir Hans Sloane, Sir Joseph Banks, and many others sit side-by-side with Pennant material.

Pennant’s specimens are spread across several of the cabinets, and his contribution is surprisingly extensive. The material primarily consists of fossil and mineral objects, including fossil fish, a collection of graptolites, trilobites, a bear jaw, and coal fossils, as well as samples of rare minerals. Each specimen was removed from the cabinets, carefully checked, photographed and recorded, with additional photographs and notes taken by me to feed back into the Curious Travellers Project.

Alongside the specimens in the fossil cabinet also sits the Pennant Wedgewood cameo medallion, a fine piece depicting the naturalist in blue jasperware. The piece was produced as part of Wedgewood’s ‘Modern Worthies’ series produced between 1775-1800 which aligns with the dates given in the British Museum’s catalogue. However, the ‘Wedgewood and Bentely’ stamp on the reverse of the cameo suggests that it was produced relatively early on in this series, dating from 1769-1780 when Josiah Wedgewood was working with Thomas Bentley.[1]

Some of the specimens displayed in the gallery can also be traced to Pennant’s publications and manuscripts, with illustrations clearly showing the specimens in hand. One of the best examples here is the Megalodon tooth, illustrated in Pennant’s ‘Fossils’ held as NLW MS 2556E by the National Library of Wales. Consequently, these objects — alongside the rest of the Pennant collection at the Natural History Museum — represent an important connection between Pennant’s natural history studies, his publications, and the art that was generated for them.

Overall, getting to experience the Enlightenment Gallery while closed, and working with our curators to ensure the conservation and care of these important Pennant specimens (not to mention those belonging to other notable 18^th century naturalists) was an incredible privilege, and one which continues to add to our investigations of Pennant’s studies in natural history.  

[1] https://www.potteriesauctions.com/news/a-guide-to-wedgwood-pottery-markings and https://fineart-restoration.co.uk/news/identifying-wedgwood-makers-marks-and-dates/

Mary-Ann Constantine

Around 1620 a map of Flintshire ‘Performed by’ the cartographer John Speed was published as part of The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. In 1778, in an extraordinary section towards the end of his first volume of Tours in Wales, we get something closer to Flintshire ‘Exposed by’ Thomas Pennant. This Tour begins at his home, Downing Hall, Whitford, near Holywell, and proceeds in a meandering fashion to Chester, down the border into Shropshire, and back up through the Vale of Clwyd. At the village of Nannerch Pennant notes that the valley forms ‘a boundary of the mineral tract of our country’. He then takes ‘a kind of bird’s eye view of the whole’, splitting the area into ‘divisions’ and, with X-Ray vision, peeling back the landscape to reveal what lies beneath.

By this point in the tour the reader is very familiar with the author’s obsessive interest in minerals and their extraction (we’ve had everything from vivid accounts of ‘peacock coal’ and smelting houses to Ancient British mining techniques and Elizabethan monopolies). It is nonetheless an intriguing moment: after all, travel writers usually tell us what they can see. One of the genre’s most popular modes in the eighteenth century is the picturesque – an aesthetic appreciation of form, light and shade, of variety and balance in the arrangement of rocks, trees, rivers, ruins. Pennant is quite capable of evoking such scenes, but here, floating like a kite above Flintshire in his ‘aerial speculation’, he strips them away, laying bare a minimalist world of minerals and metals, stretching across the county and under the Dee Estuary – strata of coal, limestone, chert and shale veined with lead and silver.  

What is especially pleasing about this rather visionary moment in the Tour is that we know it derives from years of hands-on research and collecting dating back to the 1750s. Pennant’s original specimen cabinets (beautifully made to a design by Lewis Morris of Anglesey) now sit in the NHM Mineralogy department with many items intact; better still, his own handwritten catalogue of this collection is preserved in NHM’s Library and Archives. The specimens themselves have been on their own journeys and have stories to tell – of where they began and what experiments they have undergone:

‘A marle of a brown color mixed with grey veins […] It falls to pieces readily in water, does not ferment with aq.fortis and burns to a reddish brown and greater hardness. A thick stratum of this marle is found near our summerhouse, about a foot beneath the surface.‘

You can just imagine him, while everyone else takes tea, digging away with a trowel. One lump or two? 

Pennant’s description of what we might call a Flintshire ‘underscape’ appears about thirty-five years before the visualisation of geological Britain in the gorgeous maps published by William Smith in 1815. It’s a useful reminder of the detailed knowledge accumulated over centuries of stop-start mining ventures and agricultural practice; knowledge which increased exponentially in Pennant’s time as the industrial revolution got underway and money was poured into the extractive industries and the development of new techniques.  ‘It is at this time’, as Pennant notes wryly, ‘an undetermined question, whether more wealth has been gotten out of the earth, or more lost in the search after the prizes in this subterraneous lottery.’

Rhys Kaminski-Jones

Thomas Pennant was a self-consciously enlightened traveller. Ideas that preoccupied him in his tours of eighteenth-century Wales and Scotland included the improvement of agriculture and industry, the documentation of social progress, and the scientific study of the natural world. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that Pennant also pioneered another quite different aspect of knowledge in the Celtic fringe: the placement of ancient Celtic gods in the mountainous landscapes of Wales.

In Pennant’s second volume of Welsh tours, the Journey to Snowdon (1781), he reports on an excursion from ‘the ancient seat of the Vaughans’ at Cors-y-gedol, a sixteenth-century hall in Meririonydd where he ‘was entertained by William Vaughan, esquire, for some days, in the style of an antient baron’. Pennant declares that ‘There are few places which abound more in British antiquities’ than the environs of this hall, leading his readers around a selection on nearby uplands: the Iron Age hillfort of Craig-y-Dinas, a ‘wonderous group of Druidical antiquities’ near Llyn Irddyn, and various ancient cromlechs and carneddau. At times, Pennant declares that the meaning of these monuments ‘must remain unaccounted for…by reason of the remoteness of the time, and the mystery of the antient priesthood’. But in one instance, Pennant is happy to make an exception.

At a pair of hilltop carneddau known then, according to Pennant, as ‘Bryn Cornyn Jau [Iau]’—now going by the less dramatic name ‘Llecheiddior, Cairns’—our traveller invokes a Gaulish deity discovered less than a century earlier, making this the first recorded Cambrian appearance of ‘Cernunnos’:

‘I met with on my return to Corsegedol, two great Carnedds, placed on small eminences, near to each other… The place is most remarkable for the name, Bryn Cornyn JAU. The neighbours of this antiquity are fond of rendering it, The Hill of the Horns of Jove. It more probably was a place of sacrifice before or after the chase, and derived its title from the horned deity Cernunnos, who was venerated by the Gauls, and applied to as a protector from the dangers attendant on the diversion [i.e. hunting]. Both the Gauls and Britons had one common religion; so that Cernunnos might as reasonably be supposed to have a place here as in France.’

The name ‘Cernunnos’, and the concept of a Gaulish horned god, had reappeared in Paris in 1711, when a relief depicting the deity emerged—in suitably dramatic fashion—from beneath the choir of Notre Dame cathedral.[1] There had therefore been little time to establish him across the Channel, despite growing scholarly consensus that Ancient Gauls and Britons shared a Celtic culture. We know that when Pennant actually visited Bryn Cornyn Iau in 1770 (as recorded in a notebook now being edited by Ffion Mair Jones), he made no identification with Cernunnos. His friend and collaborator John Lloyd of Wigfair, writing in the same notebook, assumed that the name straightforwardly indicated an altar to the classical god Jove/Jupiter/Zeus (who was sometimes depicted with horns), and believed the site was thus unlikely to have been purely Druidic—perhaps indicating Roman attempts to usurp a native holy place. But by the time of the Tour’s publication in 1781, Pennant had developed another theory. Relying on the scholarship of Jacques Martin, whose Religion des Gaulois (1727) helped disseminate the image of Cernunnos discovered in Paris, and probably also influenced by the Cornish antiquarian William Borlase, who had included the god in a 1769 survey of ‘Druid Doctrines’, Pennant decided that a local name suggestive of horns was proof enough to welcome Cernunnos to Wales.[2]

Sadly, modern archaeology has not followed Pennant’s thinly-evidenced flight of fancy. So why this pagan enthusiasm from a major proponent of the Welsh enlightenment? Well, firstly (as I explore in my forthcoming book), it was not in fact unusual in this period for an interest in Welsh antiquities to go together with a passion for scientific progress.[3] Using advances in historical scholarship to gaze into the Celtic past was as much an enlightenment pastime as classifying plants, extracting minerals, and improving industries—all were within the remit of an author like Pennant, who sought to revive the intellectual and cultural reputation of Wales across all fields.

Secondly, Pennant had a particular interpretation of Druidism which was helped by finding a hilltop god. Unlike other Welsh authors like Henry Rowlands and Iolo Morganwg—who believed that the Druids had been an admirable intellectual elite, with a monotheistic religion inherited from Biblical patriarchs—Pennant did not accept the ancient priests of Wales as proto-Christian proto-scientists. Predominently, for Pennant, they were superstitious primitives, whose inheritors in eighteenth-century Wales were not elite scientists like himself, but the poor commoners and ‘modern Druidesses’ [i.e. folk-healers], who clung to ‘follies that have the sanction of antiquity’. Connecting ‘Bryn Cornyn JAU’ to the image of a Gaulish deity distanced the Druids conclusively from his own enlightened status: these were not ancient worshippers of God-in-nature, but adherents of a superstitiously personified pantheon.

Pennant believed that the vestiges of Druidism and superstition in Wales had ‘been gradually dropped, in proportion as the age grew enlightened’—they would, presumably, vanish completely as the nation progressed towards modernity. It might have come as a shock to him, then, that the connection between Cernunnos and Wales that Pennant initiated would eventually become part of a revived pagan religiosity. This would take some time and effort: no solid evidence for an ancient cult of Cernunnos has been found in Wales. But Sir John Rhŷs, the Victorian Professor of Celtic at Oxford University (and an editor of Pennant’s Welsh Tours), would eventually suggest that Bendigeidfran, the giant king of Britain from the medieval Welsh Mabinogi, was a Cernunnos figure.[4] Further into the twentieth century, the anthropologist and folklorist Margaret Murray—with a little help from forgeries by the Welsh neo-druid Iolo Morganwg—was tentatively conflating Cernunnos with the pseudo-historical Welsh hero Hu Gadarn, a claim made in her hugely influential work on The God of the Witches (1931).[5] From here, the inclusion of a semi-Welsh Cernunnos figure in the pantheon of modern paganism became unavoidable—in particular via the deeply Murray-inspired mid-century traditions of Wicca.

With Cernunnos’s increasing popularity as an aspect of the neopagan ‘Horned God’, he began to filter back into entirely unrelated records of Welsh history gathered by Pennant. Take, for instance, the wooden effigy of Saint Derfel Gadarn housed in Llandderfel church, which Pennant reported to have been ‘the subject of much superstition in antient times’. Pennant was here referring to early-modern Welsh ‘superstitions’ of prophecy and Popery; the verifiable history of this carving was already compellingly sinister, with the human figure attached to it having been transported to London during the Reformation, and burned in the execution pyre of a Franciscan martyr.[6] But in the writings of twentieth-century occultists like Lewis Spence and Wiccan founder Gerald Gardner, the icon became a preserved pagan effigy, still worshipped as such in the sixteenth century, and representing Hu Gadarn and/or Cernunnos.[7] The horned deity of Notre Dame continues to find ways into Welsh-inspired paganism: Mhara Starling, a self-identified ‘Welsh Witch and Celtic Pagan’, has written about how the ‘antlered appearance’ of the Welsh supernatural figure Gwyn ap Nudd in neopagan depictions ‘seems to be a wholly modern invention, likely fusing him with other popular entities in modern Paganism…like Cernunnos’.[8]

5,000 people in Wales recorded their religion as ‘Pagan’ in the 2021 census (a write-in option that doesn’t include those who instead defined themselves as Wiccans or Druids). It’s not a huge number, but likely more than Thomas Pennant would have predicted in 1781. Pennant seems to have brought Cernunnos to Wales in order to emphasise the spiritual gulf that separated enlightened Welsh moderns from their Druidic ancestors. Instead, by imagining some desolate piles of stone as the antlers of a forgotten deity, he played a part in giving the Horned God a new home.

[1] For the influence of this discovery on eighteenth century Celticism, see Ian Stewart, The Celts: a Modern History (2025), chapter 3.

[2] See Borlase, Antiquities…of the Counties of Cornwall (1769), pp. 106–7.

[3] Rhys Kaminski-Jones, Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707–1819: True Britons and Celtic Empires (August 2025), chapter 3.

[4] John Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (1901), Vol. II, p. 552.

[5] Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches (1^st ed. 1931), chapter 1.

[6] Anne Dillon, ‘John Forest and Derfel Gadarn: A Double Execution’, Recusant History, 28.1 (2006): 1–21.

[7] Lewis Spence, Druids: Their Origin and History  p. 85; Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959).

[8] Mhara Starling, Welsh Fairies: A Guide to the Lore, Legends, Denizens & Deities of the Otherworld (2024).

Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow)

I’m currently editing Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Scotland 1772 and Voyage to the Hebrides, Part 1 for Curious Travellers Editions, and annotating this wonderful, pioneering travel account of Scotland’s West Coast has sparked off a host of personal memories. Especially Plate 13, ‘View of Loch Ranza Bay in Scotland with the manner of taking the basking shark’ (see below), based on a drawing by Moses Griffith, and Pennant’s accompanying text describing this ‘perfect monster’ as seen with his own eyes. Framed by the hills of northern Arran, and the ruins of Loch Ranza castle on the shore, the print shows a rowing boat full of sailors approaching a gigantic basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus), as the harpoonist prepares to sink his weapon into the shark’s head.

As a boy back in the sixties my family would holiday at Carradale, across the Kilbrannan Sound from Arran on the Mull of Kintyre, where my granny Isobel Macleod had grown up during the First World War. My father would rent a boat and we’d go out line fishing: we never caught much, but I remember on several occasions the sight of giant dorsal fins circling our boat, about fifty yards from the shore in shallow water, which made a strong impression on me. The Carradale man who owned the boat reassured me that the gigantic fins belonged to a basking shark, a species which fed on plankton and were entirely harmless to humans. The only risk was that the shark might capsize the boat by rubbing the keel to scratch its back in order to dislodge some irritating parasite, but fortunately this never happened.

So the imminent destruction of this harmless, benign marine giant in Pennant’s plate made me a bit melancholy, but as I researched the story of the basking shark to annotate this passage, a stronger feeling of repugnance took over, which I’ll explain below. I was delighted to learn that Pennant coined the name ‘basking shark’, and was the first to describe it scientifically in English, although the Norwegian naturalist Gunnerus had preceded him in 1765. In the 3^rd volume of British Zoology, Pennant notes that the basking shark is often confused by English writers with the ‘luna’ or sunfish: the Irish and Welsh give it a cognate name in their respective languages (the Scottish Gaelic cearban seems to be unrelated). Such names are derived from the shark’s habit of ‘lying on the surface of the water’, so in coining his neologism to avoid confusion with the sunfish, Pennant ‘took the liberty of calling it the basking shark’. (BZ III 78) We now know, of course, that it’s not ‘basking’ lazily, but rather feeding, as one of three plankton-eating shark species (along with the whale shark and megamouth shark). Pennant continued (endearingly): ‘they have nothing of the fierce and voracious nature of the shark kind, and were so tame as to suffer themselves to be stroked: they generally lay motionless on surface, commonly on their bellies, but sometimes, like tired swimmers, on their backs….Their food seemed to consist entirely of sea plants, no remains of fish being ever discovered in the stomachs of the numbers that were cut up, except some green stuff, the half digested parts of algae, and the like. (BZ III 79)

Notwithstanding its gentle nature, the basking shark had considerable utility and commercial value for its sole predator, mankind: ‘The liver was of a great size, but that of the female was the largest; some weighed above a thousand pounds, and yielded a great quantity of pure and sweet oil, fit for lamps, and also much used by the people who took them, to cure bruises, burns, and rheumatic complaints. A large fish has afforded to the captors a profit of twenty pounds… They were taken with harpoons with long lines fixed to them in much the same manner as whales are, and when struck go off with vast rapidity, and dart instantly to the bottom, taking with them forty or fifty fathoms of line, and are a long time before they are quite subdued’. (BZ III 80)

At the time of writing British Zoology, Pennant confessed that ‘it has not been our fortune to see more of this fish than fragments of the skin, jaws, and what is styled whalebone’, admitting his information was second-hand. (He also believed that basking sharks ‘have now in a manner quitted the coast, scarce one in a summer appearing in those seas’.) (BZ III 81) Hence his excitement, on 20^th June 1772, upon arriving at Loch Ranza on Arran, to be told that a basking shark ‘had been harpooned some days before, and lay on the shore, on the opposite side of the bay. Cross over to take a view of a fish so rarely to be met with in other parts of Great Britain’. At last Pennant was able to provide an eye-witness description: ‘This was twenty-seven feet four inches long. The tail consisted of two unequal lobes: the upper five feet long: the lower three. The circumference of the body great: the skin cinereous: and rough. The upper jaw much longer than the lower. The teeth minute, disposed in numbers along the jaws. The eyes placed at only fourteen inches distance from the tip of the nose, the apertures to the gills very long, and furnished with strainers of the substance of whalebone’ (Tour 1772 I 169)

However, Pennant’s tone changes as he describes the difficulty of catching and killing this shark, whose brain is about the size of a dogfish’s. ‘They are very tame or very stupid; and permit the near approach of man: will suffer a boat to follow them without accelerating their motion, till it comes almost within contact, when a harpooner strikes his weapon into the fish …as soon as they perceive themselves wounded, they fling up their tail and plunge headlong to the bottom, and frequently coil the rope round them in their agonies, attempting to disengage themselves from the weapon by rolling on the ground, for it is often found greatly bent. As soon as they discover that their efforts are in vain, they swim away with amazing rapidity and with such violence that a vessel of 70 tuns, has been towed by them against a fresh gale’ (pp.169–70). When finally landed, the liver was removed and ‘melted into oil in vessels provided for that purpose’, each large fish yielding eight barrels of oil. Pennant’s Voyage to the Hebrides was of course intended to boost the ‘cornucopian’ potential of Scotland’s impoverished and economically undeveloped Highlands and Islands, so he regrets here that public investment by the Board for the Annexed Jacobite Estates has failed due to human mismanagement, and that shark fishing was conducted only by ‘private adventurers’.

Despite my boyhood memories of the 1960s, basking sharks are now rarely to be seen on the West Coast of Scotland, having been hunted until as recently as 1994.  Classified as vermin because of the damage they do to the nets of herring fishermen, their livers were boiled down to produce ‘squalene’ for cosmetics, perfumes and lubricants. Not before time, they now appear as an endangered species on the IUCN red list, and are protected in British and European waters. Pennant might carry a share of the blame for this state of affairs, although he cannot have guessed the level of exploitation that would become possible with improved technology and resources.

Ironically, the forced disappearance of basking sharks from Hebridean waters was accelerated by none other than Gavin Maxwell, the otter-loving author of Ring of Bright Water (1960), perhaps the first nature writer whose work I ever read. In an earlier book, Harpoon at a Venture (1952: rpt. Birlinn, 2013) Maxwell identifies himself as one of Pennant’s ‘private adventurers’, who established a basking shark fishery on the island of Soay, off the coast of Skye. In his Guardian review of the Birlinn reprint, Robert Macfarlane recaps the story: ‘between 1945 and 1949, Maxwell hunted basking sharks off the west coast of Scotland, and he tried many different methods of slaughter. As well as deck-mounted machine-guns, he used shotguns “at point-blank range”, aiming “between the eyes” in order to “completely obliterate” the brain. He experimented with [manifold] harpoon designs’. He concludes that Maxwell ‘demonstrates an awesome lack of interspecies empathy, and a broader insensitivity to affect that verges on the psychopathic….The Hebridean seas become a new kill-zone, in which Maxwell can surround himself with men and weaponry and resist the “ennui of peacetime”.

As Macfarlane points out, this is a world away from today’s ‘ethically well-intentioned nature writing’, certainly qualifying the perception of Gavin Maxwell as a hero of conservation who had lived ‘in harmony with the wild world’. ‘Harpoon is about blood and bone and blades and ledger-books; about how chunks of shark flesh continue to quiver eerily for hours after death, even if the “entire fore-part of the head” has been severed with a hatchet’. Hence my repugnance in reading about Pennant and the basking shark, mentioned above. But let’s not forget that wonderful earlier description in British Zoology: ‘They have nothing of the fierce and voracious nature of the shark kind, and were so tame as to suffer themselves to be stroked: they generally lay motionless on the surface, commonly on their bellies, but sometimes, like tired swimmers, on their backs’.

Works Cited.

Basking Sharks Scotland, https://baskingsharkscotland.co.uk/basking-sharks/

Frank Fraser Darling, Natural History in the Highlands and Islands (London: Collins, 1947).

Gavin Maxwell, Harpoon at a Venture (1952; rpt. Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2013).

Robert Macfarlane, ‘Shark Attack: Gavin Maxwell’s Harpoon at a Venture’, The Guardian, 19^th July  2014.

Thomas Pennant, British Zoology 3 vols, (London: Benjamin White, 1768-70)

———————Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772. Part 1 (Chester: John Monk, 1774)