Tourism as Industry: From Scott's Trossachs to the North Coast 500

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Figures for tourism's economic value and employment are published by VisitScotland and the Scottish Government and change annually, so this card avoids precise numbers.

The Romantic tour

established In the late eighteenth century, travellers began visiting the Highlands to see wild scenery, encouraged by the Ossian poems and the idea of the sublime. Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1810), set around Loch Katrine, caused a tourist boom in the Trossachs, and his novels made Scotland a romantic destination.

American literary pilgrims

From study to sightseeing. established The literary historian Andrew Hook, in Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835 (1975), traces a steady stream of American visitors. Early in the century they came mainly for Edinburgh's learning: the Yale chemist Benjamin Silliman spent the winter of 1805–06 attending lectures and barely left Edinburgh and Glasgow. By the 1820s and 1830s Americans came for a few summer weeks, drawn by Scott, Burns and Ossian. Hook argues that their reading had already made the ground familiar, so the journey confirmed an imaginary one made long before.

The standard route. established Hook reconstructs the usual tour from their published accounts. After a week in Edinburgh, visiting Holyrood and Queen Mary's rooms, the traveller sailed up the Forth to Stirling and took a coach to Callander, perhaps the "Highlander" with a portrait of Rob Roy on its door panels. He crossed Loch Katrine by rowing boat, landing on Ellen's Isle from The Lady of the Lake, walked the few miles to Loch Lomond, took the steamer down the loch, a boat down the Leven to Dumbarton and another steamer up the Clyde to Glasgow. The circuit took about two days. A longer tour went north by Perth to Inverness, then down the Caledonian Canal by steamer, through Glencoe or out to Staffa and Iona. Hook found none of these tourists going north of Inverness, for want of roads, inns and literary associations, and notes that Wester Ross and western Sutherland lay far outside the popular routes. From Glasgow, travellers might visit the Burns country in Ayrshire, the Falls of Clyde or Robert Owen's New Lanark; Abbotsford usually needed a separate trip from Edinburgh.

Writing it up. established Many of these travellers wrote for American papers. Nathaniel Carter's letters to the New York Statesman (1825) were widely reprinted, and N. P. Willis's "Pencillings by the Way" were copied into hundreds of newspapers. By 1832 the journalist Calvin Colton wrote that Scott had consecrated these regions as "modern classic ground" (as quoted by Hook), and a reviewer in the North American Review claimed that Scott's pen had opened the Highlands "as completely as a thousand military roads" (as quoted by Hook). By 1834 Willis was sneering at the Trossachs as "the route of the cockney tourists", though he followed it anyway.

shared Hook reads the shift from Edinburgh's lecture halls to Loch Katrine's boat landings as a sign of Scotland's changing image, in which the "land of romance" overtook the land of learning and slid towards sentimental self-regard. That is his interpretation of the evidence, not a measured fact.

Railways, steamers and Cook

established Steamers on the Clyde and the lochs, and railways spreading north in the mid-nineteenth century, made travel much easier. Thomas Cook brought his first organised tour to Scotland in 1846, and Scotland became one of his most popular destinations.

Balmorality

established Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought the Balmoral estate in 1852 and rebuilt the castle. Their love of the Highlands, tartan and Highland games made them fashionable, a phenomenon sometimes called "Balmorality". Sporting estates for deer stalking, grouse shooting and fishing attracted wealthy visitors.

Festivals and modern tourism

established The Edinburgh International Festival and the Fringe began in 1947, followed by the Military Tattoo in 1950, making Edinburgh a world festival city. The Scottish Tourist Board, created in 1969, became VisitScotland. Golf, whisky, castles, wildlife and film and television locations attract visitors from around the world.

New pressures

shared The North Coast 500, a route around the northern Highlands launched in 2015, brought large numbers of visitors to remote communities, along with complaints about traffic, litter and campervans. Places such as Skye and Edinburgh have faced pressures from overtourism. The Visitor Levy (Scotland) Act 2024 allows councils to charge a levy on overnight stays, and Edinburgh moved first to introduce one.

• Walter Scott's poetry caused a tourist boom in the Trossachs.
• Thomas Cook's first Scottish tour was in 1846.
• Queen Victoria made the Highlands fashionable.
• The Edinburgh festivals began in 1947.
• The North Coast 500 was launched in 2015.
• In the 1820s the coach from Stirling to Callander, the "Highlander", carried a portrait of Rob Roy on its doors.
• The visitors' book at a viewing house above Corra Linn on the Falls of Clyde held the signature of the Virginian politician John Randolph of Roanoke, as the New York editor Nathaniel Carter found in 1825.
• Andrew Hook found no American tourist of the period who went north of Inverness.

• Misconception: the American travellers whose accounts survive were typical tourists. They were mostly writers, scholars and clergy who published for readers at home; Hook notes they were only a fraction of the Americans who came.
• Myth: Scott alone created the romantic tour. Ossian, Burns and older interest in Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobites shaped what visitors went to see; Hook calls Scott the inheritor, not the creator, of that tradition.