Celtic Environments: Welsh Industrial Landscapes through French Travelogues

Abstract

It has rightly been argued that the growth of the cult of the local in France has to do with France's need to re-invent its own past in the wake of the Revolution of 1789. This article suggests the importance of the Industrial Revolution, and changes to physical environments in this same development, by analysing travelogues by Celtomaniac French visitors to Wales in the 1860s. Unlike their own Celtic land, Brittany, Wales was a place where the issues of modernization, industrialization and changes to the local environment met head on with that of the survival of an ancient indigenous culture.

Procuring Snakes: Thomas Pennant and recent scholarship in Welsh writing of the long eighteenth century

“…Some of the connections established via that network continue to create new research pathways, such as the new EU‐funded Ireland‐Wales project, “Ports, Past and Present”: http://portspastpresent.eu/ [accessed November 13, 2019]. Cultural exchange between Wales and Brittany is also currently a vibrant research field; see, for example, le Disez & Williams, , Williams, .…”