COASTAL ROUTES is a timely project in our contemporary moment of environmental change and climate crisis as rising sea levels and flooding, coastal erosion and loss of habitats are transforming the Atlantic coastlines. The project asked how the recovery of an historical archive of travel texts about Ireland and Scotland’s Atlantic shorelines can speak to anticipated future developments in tourism by analysing the competing aesthetic and economic values attached to coastscapes.
Travel writing was the principal genre for representing the natural world during the Romantic period that offers the opportunity to unlock the tensions between aesthetic, economics, and natural heritage that often remain hidden in other genres. Examination of dominant narratives as expressed in travel texts, with their lasting relevance for today’s branding of coastal routes, offers new knowledge about the relationship between cultural heritage and environmental protection. The Romantic-era framing of the “wild” and “sublime” landscapes of the Highlands and coasts informs their interpretation even now, with Ireland’s 2,500-km coastal route marketed as the “Wild Atlantic Way” since 2014, followed shortly after by Scotland’s tourism strategy for the “North Coast 500”. By turning an EH lens on travel writing, COASTAL ROUTES counters the tendency to foreground nation-centred and imperial narratives, or Romantic aesthetics of nature and the sublime. The project advanced the field by addressing ideas of abundance, wilderness and waste, and their relation to contemporary concerns of sustainability, development, and natural heritage.
The primary research questions for this project were:
1. What can travel literature tell us about the relationship between people, place, and environment?
2. In what ways do travel narratives shape ecological awareness within the wider cultural and political context?
3. When did modern ideas of wilderness and uncultivated land take shape, and how do Scotland and Ireland differ on this front?
4. How does tourism, as an activity and an industry, conceptualise and shape the environment in these most western regions of the Atlantic archipelago?
