Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland

Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803 (1874) is a travel memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth about a six-week, 663-mile journey through the Scottish Highlands from August–September 1803 with her brother William Wordsworth and mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some have called it "undoubtedly her masterpiece" and one of the best Scottish travel literature accounts during a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries which saw hundreds of such examples. It is often compared as the Romantic counterpart to the better-known Enlightenment-era A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) by Samuel Johnson written about 27 years earlier. Dorothy wrote Recollections for family and friends and never saw it published in her lifetime.

The three travelers were important authors in the burgeoning Romanticism movement and thus the trip itinerary was in part a literary pilgrimage to the places associated with Scottish figures significant to Romanticists such as Robert Burns, Ossian, Rob Roy, William Wallace, and contemporary Sir Walter Scott. Dorothy's descriptions and judgments of the countryside and landscapes were a mixture of her own personal aesthetics and the in-fashion aesthetics of the sublime, beautiful and picturesque—in fact Recollections is considered today a classic of picturesque travel writing.

Venturing to Scotland in 1803 was not an easy trip and the thirty-year-old Dorothy would experience much of the rougher nature of Scottish life. Scotland had become depopulated in areas from emigration throughout the 18th century and the remaining rural Scots existed in a preindustrial lifestyle more reminiscent of the Middle Ages than modern times. The roads were poor and dangerous or mere cattle-paths requiring a local guide. Dorothy notes the road quality along each segment from "most excellent", "roughish", to "very bad" to "wretchedly bad". Finding a place to sleep meant finding a public house along the road, which could range from a pleasant inn by English standards, to a dirty and smoky peasants hut with no glass windows nor chimney and a dirt floor. More than once the Wordsworths were refused a room for the night [ such as the Arrochar Hotel] after dark in the rain with miles to the next town; however this was contrasted by the kindness and generosity of others, the MacFarlane's at Loch Katrine.[7] Food in 19th century Scotland along the road ranged from boiled fowl and egg on the high end to whey and oat bread on the low end (or none at all in some cases), although "A boiled sheep's head, with the hair singed off" was a true Scottish fare savored.

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