In this post, Gareth Roddy introduces his new book — Atlantic Isles: Travel and Identity in the British and Irish West, 1880-1940 — which is published in the Society’s ‘New Historical Perspectives’ series with University of London Press.
Atlantic Isles examines the cultural and political prominence of the ‘westward gaze’ which flourished in late-nineteenth century Britain and Ireland. From Cornish cliffs and Welsh mountains to Hebridean islands and the Connemara highlands, the west was an imagined geography that transcended the national territories of these isles.
Gareth’s book draws on wide-ranging contemporary sources, including works of geology, philology, ethnology, history, geography, archaeology, folklore, literature, sociology and an extensive collection of travel writing.
The significance of western landscapes for national identities is well known but — as Atlantic Isles shows — the west was also central to debates about Britishness and to the bold attempt to construct a narrative of multinational union that claimed deep historical roots at a time when Home Rule dominated political debate.
Atlantic Isles is the 24th title in the Society’s New Historical Perspectives series for early career historians. Gareth’s book, and other titles in the series are published free, Open Access, and in paperback print.
The west has long gripped the imagination.
In the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans looked westwards to what they described as the end of the earth, which inspired fear and wonder, and represented the border between the known world and the mystery of what lay beyond it.
The west is mysterious and remote in Celtic mythology, too, where the otherworld, Tír na nÓg, lies towards the setting sun. In more recent times, writers such as Tim Robinson, Robert Macfarlane, and David Gange have felt what Robinson called ‘the pull of magnetic west’, which is as much a voyage into the imagination as a journey to a geographical location.[i]
My new book, Atlantic Isles, is a study of the idea of the west in modern Ireland and Britain, which, I argue, came to cultural and political prominence in the late nineteenth century.
In the British and Irish context western landscapes are typically understood in relation to their immediate national territories. Historians have shown, for instance, how the Gaeltacht regions – Irish-speaking areas of the rural west – were central to the Gaelic League’s spatial imagining of Ireland in the 1890s, and the romanticised Irish west remained the symbolic heart of the nation after the establishment of the Free State.[ii]
Similarly, in Wales, political nationalism drew inspiration from Y Fro Gymraeg – the areas of the north and west where the Welsh language and culture had survived in the mountains, and Scotland’s north-west was the centre of Highland cultural nationalism, which, alongside Lowland Teutonism, represented the duality of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottishness.[iii]
In England, the Cotswolds and Wessex supported an organicist version of Englishness in the interwar period, defined by its ‘Westernness’ against a ‘south-east metropolitan zone’, and Cornwall has also been understood as a place of difference which, with its distinctive national identity, has made it both familiar and yet potentially threatening to English unity.[iv] There is no doubt that western landscapes shaped, and continue to shape, these national imaginaries.
From Cornish cliffs and Welsh mountains to Hebridean islands and the Connemara highlands, the west was understood as a collection of places that shared certain environmental and cultural characteristics.
Atlantic Isles, however, argues that a transnational understanding of western landscapes flourished in the British-Irish Isles from the late nineteenth century.
In this period, the expanding transport network brought places in the far west into closer contact with the metropolitan centres of these isles. At the same time, a rapidly expanding number of readers and travellers became familiar with western landscapes in written accounts and images, and as tourists. From Cornish cliffs and Welsh mountains to Hebridean islands and the Connemara highlands, the west was understood as a collection of places that shared certain environmental and cultural characteristics – an imagined geography that transcended the national territories of these isles.
In the west, geologists uncovered ancient layers of rock, and ethnologists described the preponderance of older racial ‘types’. Philologists looked westwards for the survival of Celtic languages, and antiquarians and archaeologists marvelled at the increasing density of megalithic monuments at the Atlantic coastline. Geographers explained these differences by dividing the British-Irish Isles into a south-eastern lowland area and a north-western upland area. Writers of non-fiction, including travel writing, popularised the associational values of western landscapes for readers and also for tourists who explored the increasingly accessible west along roads, railways and steamer routes.
Atlantic Isles: the west in four case study areas
In Atlantic Isles, I follow the idea of the west through works of geology, philology, ethnology, history, geography, archaeology, folklore, literature, sociology and an extensive collection of travel writing.
In doing so I look across national borders, and this book therefore offers an important contribution to the nationally framed historiographies of western landscapes in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Without such an approach, the west fractures into four distinct areas, each enclosed within the borders of the national territory, and its broader significance is difficult to perceive. So powerful was the idea of the west in this period that it constituted what I call a ‘westward gaze’ in British and Irish culture.
Exploring the west in this manner reveals two further insights. First, western landscapes were especially powerful places of modern enchantment, where geological research, archaeological finds, and ongoing coastal erosion provided tantalising evidence suggesting that folk tales and myths about sunken kingdoms and phantom islands might have a basis in fact. Far from demystifying western landscapes and dispelling wonder, the rational and sceptical mind of the geologist and archaeologist helped to imbue otherwise fantastical stories with a different kind of imaginative power, which relied on the very scientific and technological developments traditionally understood as agents of disenchantment.
So powerful was the idea of the west in this period that it constituted what I call a ‘westward gaze’ in British and Irish culture.
Second, western landscapes were at the centre of a bold attempt to construct a deeply historical narrative of the United Kingdom. This variety of Britishness attempted to incorporate Ireland in its narrative scope at a time when the subject of Home Rule periodically dominated political debate. The pan-insular historical narratives of Britishness played out on three temporal scales, including geological processes measured by extensive periods of deep time, millennia of racial and linguistic developments indicating westward-moving waves of invasion and settlement, and centuries of historical conflict apparently resolved by political union.
The role of western landscapes in constructing national and separatist identities is well known, but what is less well understood is the attempt to produce a pluralistic version of Britishness that not only included western landscapes but drew strength from contemporaries’ perceptions of their expressive differences. Moreover, the fact that this version of Britishness included Ireland, and claimed geological, geographical, racial, linguistic and cultural roots, means that Britishness has taken forms that are both broader and deeper than many historians have hitherto recognised.
References
[i] Tim Robinson, Labyrinth: Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (London, 1997 [1995]), 234; David Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel (London, 2019); Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (London, 2007), 15-16.
[ii] Aidan Beatty, ‘The Gaelic League and the Spatial Logics of Irish Nationalism’, Irish Historical Studies 43, no. 163 (2019), 55–72.
[iii] Pyrs Gruffudd, ‘Remaking Wales: Nation-building and the Geographical Imagination, 1925–50’, Political Geography 14, no. 3 (1995), 219–39; Colin Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880’, The Scottish Historical Review 74, no. 197 (1995), 45–68.
[iv] David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998), 15–18, 129–30; Shelley Trower, Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall (Manchester, 2015).
About the Author
Gareth Roddy is a Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History in the Department of Humanities, University of Northumbria.
He joined the Department as a Lecturer in September 2023, following on from his Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, 2020-23. He previously taught at the University of Sheffield, where he completed his doctoral thesis in 2019. Gareth is a historian of modern Britain and Ireland, and is particularly interested in landscapes and identity, borders, peripheries, and the history of travel and tourism.
Atlantic Isles: Travel and Identity in the British and Irish West, 1880–1940 is Gareth’s first monograph, published by University of London Press in the New Historical Perspectives series
About the ‘New Historical Perspectives’ book series from the Royal Historical Society
New Historical Perspectives (NHP) is the Society’s book series for early career scholars (within ten years of their doctorate), commissioned and edited by the Royal Historical Society, in association with University of London Press and the Institute of Historical Research, and with support from the Economic History Society.
The series publishes monographs and edited collections by early career historians on all chronologies and histories, worldwide. Contracted authors receive mentoring and an author workshop to develop their manuscript before its final submission.
All titles in the series are published in paperback print and Open Access (as pdf downloads and Manifold reading editions) with costs covered by University of London Press and the Royal Historical Society.
Atlantic Isles: Travel and Identity in the British and Irish West, 1880–1940 is the 24th volume published in the series (October 2025). For more on current and forthcoming titles in the series, for 2025 and 2026, please see here.
HEADER IMAGE: Poster, London Midland & Scottish Railway, Connemara, ‘Ireland This Year’ (detail), by Paul Henry (1877–1958), about 1925, printed by McCorquordale & Co Ltd. © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum. All rights reserved. Available to license under: CC BY- NC- SA 4.0, Atlantic Isles: Travel and Identity in the British and Irish West, 1880–1940, p. 46.
