On 31 July 1806, John Fiott, later known as John Lee, left London to embark on a seven-month walking tour of Ireland, England and Wales. I wrote about his life, and about his walking tour of England in Wales in earlier posts. This post will look at the six months he spent walking around the southern half of Ireland in 1806-07.

Lee was quite a devoted diarist, writing almost every day for the duration of his tour, and making many sketches of buildings, landscapes, and village scenes. His diaries and sketchbooks are today housed in the wonderful old library of St John’s College, Cambridge. In 2010, I spent three months there transcribing the originals – over 1000 pages of Lee’s pencil scrawl – and the Hakluyt Society will soon publish my critical edition of the diaries.

Lee’s tour of Ireland began with his arrival in Dublin on the night of 29/30 August 1806. His itinerary brought him south via Wicklow and Kilkenny to Waterford and Cork, around Kerry, the Dingle Peninsula and Blasket Islands, north into Limerick and through the midlands, back to Dublin and, briefly, a little north to Drogheda. This included two of the principal tourist sites in Ireland in the period – the Wicklow Mountains and the Lakes of Killarney. However, Lee also saw less well-known locations, like the Blasket Islands, making him one of the earliest non-Irish people to record a visit to the islands. Read my article on his short visit to the Blaskets here.

Interest in Ireland was growing in the aftermath of the Act of Union, so Lee was one of a number of notable English antiquarian and literary travellers to Ireland at the time. The traveller and antiquary Richard Colt Hoare had been all over Western Europe and Britain, and in 1806 he made a tour of Ireland, publishing his observations the following year. Sir John Carr, dubbed the “jaunting-car” for the unsubstantial style of his six travel books, visited Ireland in 1805 and published The Stranger in Ireland in August 1806, just as Lee was embarking on his Irish tour, so it is unlikely that Lee could have read it until after his return to England in spring 1807.

The ongoing Napoleonic Wars had made the Continent less accessible, but other factors contributed to increasing Ireland’s popularity as a destination. Road transportation had improved, and canals had extended westwards; more guidebooks were published, and their quality improved. Finally, Glenn Hooper has demonstrated how Ireland’s accession to the Union in 1801 presented an attraction to English visitors eager to familiarise themselves with the ‘Sister Isle’ – even if the extent to which the island was portrayed as unfamiliar to English readers was somewhat overstated. Two decades prior to the Union, the clergyman and writer Thomas Campbell stated, ‘There is, perhaps, no country dependent on the British Crown, which Englishmen know less of than Ireland; and yet it may safely be affirmed, there is none which has a fairer and a stronger claim to their attention’. In 1806, Richard Colt Hoare still claimed that Ireland ‘remained unvisited and unknown.’ It is worth noting at this point that 100-or-so travel accounts of Ireland had been published in the second half of the eighteenth century alone. 

On an individual level, the motivation behind Lee’s walking tour was described by a friend as a ‘furor for rambling’. His account is a charter of the experiences of the romantic solitary pedestrian. Lee travelled mostly on foot, struggling through bogs and over mountains, enjoying the easily negotiated towing paths of Ireland’s growing canal network. Walking gave Lee the opportunity to observe the detail of his surroundings. He made lists of the plants and flowers he saw, and made geological notes. His experience was deeply personal and subjective. Approaching the Lakes of Killarney he wrote, ‘A companion here would spoil this, for no person could share time to speak the mind and [the] soul is so wrapt up in itself and so full of the sensations which the surrounding objects excite.’ Answering accusations that walking was evidence of parsimony, he confided to his diary that he preferred being in the open air, “instead of being parked up in a cage and travelling like a dead body in a hearse.” Occasionally, when the landscape became too challenging or when time was pressing, he hitched lifts on farmers’ and tradesmen’s carts, preferring these to the more comfortable ‘carriage and four’ favoured by other gentleman travellers.

As a marginal region of the British Isles, Ireland represented an accessible exoticism for the genteel English traveller. Glenn Hooper highlights Ireland’s main attractions for British travellers in the period as a remedy to an ‘epistemological vacuum’, concerns for political knowledge of Ireland in the wake of the rebellions of 1798 and 1803, and concerns about the island’s poverty and underdevelopment.

But, travellers’ expectations of Ireland were marred by the memory of the violence of ‘98 and the harsh realities of poverty, political unrest and landlord absenteeism. Their experiences and perceptions of Ireland were overshadowed by the darkness of its recent history. Throughout his Irish diaries, Lee paid a great deal of attention to the late rebellions and savoured recording its events as related to him by participants and witnesses on both sides. Eyewitnesses described to Lee the landing of the French fleet under General Humbert at Killala on 22 August 1798; the hangings and floggings meted out on both sides; the villages razed to the ground.

The raw memory of ’98 permeates Lee’s experiences in Ireland, notably altering the tone of romantic solitude that was established during the Welsh section of his tour. On his first day in Dublin, his host related stories of treacherous servants; on his second day, he visited Thomas Street, where Robert Emmet launched the uprising of 1803. And walking through part of the Wicklow Mountains in the company of soldiers, Lee heard the stories embedded in that landscape, saw the remains of abandoned rebel camps and the burnt-out remains of great houses. In Tipperary, he spent a number of days in the company of Sir Thomas Judkin ‘Flogging’ Fitzgerald, who brutally targeted suspected rebels in the region in 1798. Lee demonstrates clear admiration for Fitzgerald and his actions, despite his own admission that Fitzgerald was “a most violent man and therefore dangerous.”

The violence of the island’s recent history impacted on Lee’s walking habits. He was suspicious of one young man who joined him on an evening walk, gripping his geologist’s hammer in case it would be required for self-defence, but realised afterwards that the man had only wanted company. A few weeks later, though, lost in the hills of Kerry, he remembered his fear of robbery and swore he would not walk late in the evening again.

For Lee, Ireland was all about history. Not only did he record stories of ’98 and 1803, he also travelled north to Drogheda specifically to visit the site of the Battle of the Boyne – further evidence of his understanding of Ireland as a space inhabited by its own troubled history. He made detailed sketches of the site and the surrounding area, taking particular notice of battlefield archaeology. Lee reserves judgment on the events at the Boyne, his pilgrimage to the site speaking for itself and sitting in juxtaposition to his entertainment that evening by some of the last great harpers in the Irish tradition, some of whom had participated in the great Belfast Harp Festival of 1792.

See some of Lee’s sketches here.

Sources:

Hooper, Glenn. “The Isles/Ireland: the Wilder Shore.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 174–90.

Hooper, Glenn. Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860: Culture, History, Politics. Houndmills, 2005.

Lee, John. “Diaries and Sketchbooks of Tour from London to Ireland, August 1806–March 1807.” 1806-7. MS. St John’s College, University of Cambridge, U.30 (1-8).