In a letter dated 7th February 1895, Joseph Gibson Stott, first editor of the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal and recent emigrant to New Zealand, offered his views on the quarterly's latest issue to William Douglas, his successor in the post:There is too much 'mountain timetable' these days . . . what I want is a paper-in which I can hear the roaring of the torrent, and see the snows and the brown heather and the clouds flying athwart the blue above the rocky peaks-something that will set my pulses beating; and conjure up dear old Scotland; and what is of no particular interest are some of these papers; all miles and fact and minutes, and endless dissection of the unhappy points of the compass. To me these are really little more interesting than an architect's specification for building a dry stane dyke. 1 While readers might not necessarily share these views, amid the elegant protestations an intriguing line of argument emerges: one that sets up the aesthetic and sensual qualities of mountain walking in direct opposition to reductive and numerical abstractions of those same experiences on foot. For Gibson Stott, the familiar conventions of the romantic landscape canon were routed through a personal, emotional connection with nature's sublime qualities. However masterful, his mountaineer was also embodied: a sensing traveller attentive to feelings of freedom, awe and longing inspired by natural surroundings. It was with considerable regret that he noted efforts increasingly skewed towards a quantification of outdoor practice. His problemperceived in bold relief-was a very different mode for registering outdoor experience: one based on objective measurement, cartographic knowledge and normative conduct. Numbers, facts and systems for order, it seems, were the province of an unpalatably rational frame of mind.

This article aims to situate nature, not as an organised and mapped space but rather in the way in which it is lived and experienced. Given the fact that most tourists who come to Iceland claim the reason for their visit to be the natural landscapes of Iceland, tourism in Iceland has focused on so-called nature-based tourism. This is not new because eighteenth-century to early twentieth-century travellers and explorers were affected by the sublimity of the landscapes they encountered and, hence, have had their influences in shaping the meaning of the contemporary, institutional definitions of natural landscapes. These are definitions that leave out the lived experience and also deny nature its vitality and movement. As Tim Ingold has argued, nature as it is experienced is an animated being, and as such, one enters into the atmosphere of vibrant surroundings that one engages with. In order to situate nature, I travel to Snæfellsjökull National Park in Iceland.

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Tourism to Iceland has and continues to benefit from its geographic position as a stopover between the North American and Eurasian continents and as an extension of the exoticised Arctic North. In that context, we argue that Iceland as a destination functions as a gateway, which should be used as a way of recognising the wider network responsible for the multiple interpretations of destination image. Accordingly, this article argues that despite the relationality of Iceland's destination image, it has been represented as a tourism gateway by those with power to do so, producing a destination between centre and periphery as a gateway to an exoticised and commodified elsewhere. A recent advertising campaign from Iceland's leading airline, Icelandair, was semiologically analysed as an example of travel representations that inform and shape destination image. A postcolonial lens was applied recognising that these representations are produced within a dichotomy of centreperiphery that has implications to Iceland's present image as a travel destination.

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