Edmund Burke

 The prevailing attitude to mountains up to the late 18th C, even if they were regarded as sacred sites, was one of fear and awe.  They were the source of bad weather, one didn't venture into them lightly and according to a Swiss scientist 'they were the abode of dragons'.

Joseph Jacob Scheuchzer carried out extensive studies on the mountain environment.  His work on glaciology may have led to future exploration of mountain regions. His Proof of the Existence of Dragons may have expressed the generally held view of the era.  On the 'Grand Tour', if mountains were to be traversed, the curtains were drawn on the carriage windows lest the scenes were too dramatic.

Edmund Burke was an 18th C Irish author, political theorist, philosopher and Whig politician in the Westminster Parliament.  He was not the first  to discuss the concept of the 'sublime'.  Before him most writers on the subject "agreed that pleasant feeling of awe, delight, and admiration were the result of contemplating mountain ranges ..."  In his   A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful he developed, uniquely, a physiological theory of beauty and sublimity and was the first to explain the concepts in terms of the process of perception and its effect upon the perceiver. 

His ideas on this can be seen to have influenced many of the poets and painters of the Romantic Era leading up to the early years of the 19th C.  In England the key figures of the romantic movement are considered to include the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley and artists such as Constable and Turner and the works of such people had a significant influence in the change of attitude towards nature, wilderness and the mountain environment.

Mary Tighe

An almost forgotten Irish poetess was Mary Tighe (1772-1810).  Her writing is said to have influenced Keats, Byron and Shelley and the Irish lyricist Thomas Moore among others.  A number of her poems extolled the beauties of the mountains, woods and lakes around Killarney after her visit there in about 1800.

Robert James Graves (1796-1853) was a Dublin surgeon, who travelled widely in Europe and on one visit in the Swiss Alps, Graves became acquainted with the painter JMW Turner. They travelled and sketched together for several months, eventually parting company in Rome.

In general it would have been the wealthy middle and upper classes that would have been familiar with the works of such poets and artists and as much as the appreciation of poetry and art was part of a good education so, also, had become the appreciation of landscape.  All of these may have become the motivation for the phenomenon that become known as the 'Grand Tour'.

By Mary Tighe

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