Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

Curious Travellers: Travels at Home

Introduction

  • Friday 20 September 2024

  • 10.00–5.30

  • Drwm, National Library of Wales

  • Aberystwyth

A day of discussions and presentations from the Curious Travellers project about work in progress on digital editions of Thomas Pennant’s Tours in Wales and Scotland, a new biography, crowdsourcing images by Moses Griffith at NLW, exhibitions at Greenfield Valley and art in a Whitford primary school, plus exciting new prospects for the Pennant collections at the Natural History Museum and a double book launch!

It was a hybrid event.

Programme

9.45: Arrivals and coffee

I:  Editing Pennant: Digital Editions of the Tours of Wales and Scotland

10.00–11.30 

  • Mary-Ann Constantine (CAWCS): Welcome and introduction 

  • Ffion Mair Jones (CAWCS): ‘O lawysgrif i brint: Teithiau Pennant ym Meirionnydd ac Eryri (1770–81)’ [simultaneous translation available] 

  • Alex Deans (Glasgow): ‘“My thirst after natural history is unquenchable”: Thomas Pennant’s letters to Charles Lyttelton, Bishop of Carlisle (1768)’

  • Nigel Leask (Glasgow): ‘What’s happened to the Scottish Enlightenment in Pennant’s Tours?’

Discussion 

11.30: Ten-minute comfort break

II: Pennant and Visual Culture                      

11.40–12.30 

Chair: Martin Crampin (CAWCS) 

Lisa Cardy (Natural History Museum), Luca Guariento (Glasgow), Eilir Evans (National Library of Wales) 

Presentation of a crowdsourcing project tagging images from NLW’s extra-illustrated copies of Pennant’s Tours

12.30–1.30: Buffet lunch at CAWCS and a chance to see some of Pennant’s works in the Summers Room, NLW 

III: Pennant, Early and Late 

1.30–3.00 

  • R. Paul Evans: ‘The 1750s – the neglected, yet career defining, decade in the life of Thomas Pennant’

  • Michael Freeman: ‘Paid for rejoycing at Holywell upon my son’s marriage’: the account book of David Pennant of Downing, 1756–61’ 

  • Rhys Kaminski-Jones (CAWCS): ‘Doctor Druid and the Druids of India’

Discussion 

3.00–3.30: Tea and Welsh cakes 

IV: Pennant and Natural History 

3.30–4.20

  • Stephanie Holt (NHM): ‘Recovering the Pennant Collections at the National History Museum’

  • Edwin Rose (Cambridge/NHM): ‘Working from Home: Thomas Pennant and the Arctic Zoology’

Discussion 

4.20: Ten-minute comfort break                                                    

V: In Pennant Country 

4.30–5.15 

  • Sarah Baylis: ‘Flintshire’s best kept secret? Pennant in the community’

  • Elizabeth Edwards and Sean Harris: ‘Making C21st Pennant – copperplate to classroom’

  • Mary-Ann Constantine: Closing remarks and thanks 

5.30: Wine reception and launch in CAWCS 

  • Mary-Ann Constantine, Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour 1760–1820 (OUP, 2024) 

  • Sean Harris et al., A Whitford Ornithology (CAWCS Publications, 2024)

A print from an eighteenth-century book showing a wooded slope descending towards fields; beyond them a hill rises steeply up to a summit with the remains of the castle of Dinas Brân.
Dinas Brân by Moses Griffith (National Library of Wales)

Acknowledgements

Curious Travellers is funded by the AHRC and is a collaboration between the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, the University of Glasgow and the Natural History Museum, London.

Logos: Arts and Humanities Research Council, University of Glasgow, Natural History Museum, CAWCS.