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Abstract
This paper examines the waterfall in travellers’ accounts and guidebooks of Scotland between 1769 and 1830. As well as providing easily accessible punctuation points in the narratives of travellers journeying through the often bleak surroundings of the Scottish Highlands, waterfalls were central to the main aesthetic categories devoted to interpretation of natural features in this period, the sublime and the picturesque. With reference to these categories – the sublime disclosing sentiments of awe, even of terror; the picturesque, detached contemplation – the paper discusses waterfalls as static objects, and as instances of dynamic processes. Waterfalls are perhaps the pre-eminent landform for static, picturesque appraisal. At the same time, they are inescapably dynamic, embodying characteristics associated with the sublime such as multi-sensory experience, non-human agency, and emotional and affective impact. These latter characteristics are recognised by recent phenomenological approaches to landscape in human geography, in contrast with more visual, representational treatments of landscape.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professors Charles W. J. Withers, Hayden Lorimer, and Chris Philo for their guidance and thorough comments on drafts of this paper, and Prof. Emily Brady and Dr Fraser MacDonald for guidance and discussion; also to the staff of Edinburgh University Library and the National Library of Scotland for their assistance in helping me access a variety of sources; finally, to the friends who joined me on visits to some of the wonderful places discussed in this paper.
Notes
1 Only domestic accounts are included, mostly by English writers with a few native Scots. Waterfalls were also included in some important literary works of the period such as those by Scott and Smollett, and parodies by Combe and Richardson, but for reasons of space they have been excluded from this investigation.
2 Another rare example is McGreevy (Citation1992) who discusses the metaphorical associations of Niagara Falls with death and the after-life.
3 Sixty published works were studied, which mentioned over a hundred different waterfalls in total. A selection of authors and falls are mentioned in this paper.
4 Much of the work on affect falls under the banner of ‘non-representational theory’ (NRT), through which ‘varied notions of performance, practice, materiality and embodied agency have increasingly come to the fore in human geographical research’ (Wylie Citation2007, p. 163; see also Lorimer Citation2005; Macpherson Citation2010). Non-representational theory and phenomenology share many concerns such as a recognition of multisensory experience. They differ, however, in that strictly phenomenological accounts treat human subjective experience as their core concern whereas NRT seeks to de-centre the human as the focus of significant experience.
5 The beautiful as a specific aesthetic category has been omitted from this analysis because when used in contradistinction to the picturesque or sublime, it is less appropriate than these categories for describing the aesthetic qualities associated with waterfalls, and in its broad sense it could be applied to almost any waterfall.
6 Litton and Tetlow (Citation1974) offer a visual classification system for landscape water features, identifying three basic elements of these features: water, landform, and vegetation. Given that waterfalls occur at an abrupt change in height, the bones of the land are often revealed in a cliff face, and the spray provides a home for vegetation, so all three elements tend to be strongly revealed.
7 Noted geologist and President of the Geological Society of London between 1816 and 1818.
8 Similar debates take place today over the locating of ‘affect’, as discussed above.
9 One of the few popular waterfalls at the time north of the Great Glen.
10 Stott's book lists around 750 falls by region. This paper owes a debt to its wealth of literary and historical detail, but has not been guided by it in choice of site or method.
11 In many respects this present-day interest in ‘geotourism’ revives aspects of the early days of geology, when some geologists (including John Macculloch on occasion) used ‘the romantic, the speculative and the poetical’ (O'Connor Citation2009, p. 331) to popularise their scientific theories.
12 The cultural and aesthetic importance of these Falls have also been emphasised as important factors in the report by the group opposing a proposed extension to a quarry very close to the river (Stephens Citation2014).