Historianka

Tag: diaries

  • Scientific Travels in Nineteenth-Century Donegal

    Donegal welcomed some notable scientific travellers in the nineteenth century. They were drawn to the region principally because it was, in the words of one of the era’s most celebrated scientists, Humphry Davy, ‘in many respects peculiar and out of the track of ordinary tourists.’[1] These people were attracted by what they saw as the…

  • A Derry Merchant’s Memoir, 1830s

    While doing some other research in Library and Archives Canada some years ago, I came across a reference in the catalogue to an anonymous diary describing a journey from Derry to Canada in 1830. Intrigued, I took a copy of the manuscript and filed it away for later. But the author’s anonymity bothered me, as…

  • Lovers and ‘Paupers’: the ‘Gap Year’ in the 1830s

    This post takes a look at another young gentleman on a series of ‘gap year’ tours – William Hartigan Barrington, son of Sir Matthew, who built Glenstal Castle, Co. Limerick. Barrington was interested in new experiences, meeting young women, and finding out about poverty. Has the ‘gap year’ changed all that much? Between 1833 and…

  • ‘Balloonacy’ in the Arctic, 1799

    The first air balloon launch in the Arctic took place at Enontekiö, Finland, in July 1799. It came about with the meeting of two travelling Englishmen and a local pastor. Edward Daniel Clarke, later first professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University, was then employed as tutor to a young travelling gentleman, John Marten Cripps. The…

  • Grief and Hardships on the Family Tour

    Between 1827 and 1854, Dorothea and John Ladeveze Adlercron of Moyglare, Co. Meath, and their children made a series of tours of France, Switzerland and Italy. Dorothea (1800–79) was daughter of Abraham George Rothe (1768–1846) of Kilkenny and Anne Salisbury (d. 1842). Detailed records of these tours survive in Dorothea’s diaries and the passports issued to the family in various…

  • Peter Fidler: the fur-trader who trekked 48,000 miles

    Peter Fidler was one of Canada’s greatest exploratory surveyors and his work formed the basis for the mapping of Western Canada. He produced two large-scale shoreline sketch maps, eight smaller-scale maps, and 373 segmental sketch maps, representing 7,300 miles of track and river. While travelling an estimated 48,000 miles by foot and canoe, he assisted in the establishment…

  • John Lee’s Walking Tour of England and Wales, August 1806

    See John Lee’s biography here. On 31 July 1806, 21-year-old John Fiott (later known as John Lee) set out on a seven-month walking tour of England, Wales, and Ireland. He walked almost every day and kept a detailed diary of the things he saw and the people he met. Those diaries, totalling over 540 manuscript pages,…

  • Attempted Murder and Swindling Children: Irish Accounts of 19th-Century Belarus

    “I have just written the word Kattova, and what think you, Ladys and gentlemen the place is like?” (Martha Wilmot to her mother, 29 June 1804, Royal Irish Academy, Wilmot papers, MS 12L24, p. 216) Today, Belarus is a country relatively few Irish people visit. In the early nineteenth century, however, the region was the westernmost portion of the…