A published travel book was rarely if ever astraightforward account of a single journey. Often,multiple journeys were selectively combined. Authorsmight also augment a description of a journey withextra information acquired retrospectively via otherforms of research. And Enlightenment travel writingwas, as Innes Keighren et al. have pointed out,‘highly accretional’, in that travel books alwaysstimulated and were stimulated by others. This wasespecially true for works of Scottish travel. TheWelsh naturalist and traveller Thomas Pennant(1726–1798) exemplifies these points well. He reliedon the Edinburgh-based antiquary George Paton(1721–1807) for the planning of his journey to theHighlands and Islands of Scotland, and for mid-tourassistance, and especially post-tour for additionalinformation as he prepared his travel book forpublication. The effect of Pennant's regularrequests was to send Paton on a series of extrajourneys through Edinburgh to augment the materialPennant had collected (or missed) on his tripsthrough Scotland. Pennant used these additionalpost-trip journeys, plus Paton's pre- and mid-tourassistance, to piece together his Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to theHebrides (1774; hereafter Voyage), which was one ofthe influential early travel books that helped toturn Scotland into a tourist destination. Indeed,Katherine Haldane Grenier has argued that tourismfrom the 1770s onwards actually created Scotland, while Pam Perkinssuggests that ‘Scotland helped to shape the conceptand practice of modern tourism’. It was thanks tothe early efforts of Pennant, and the popularreception of his work, that a regular Scottishtourist route could be identified by the early1780s. This chapter looks at Pennant's piecingprocess to better understand how touristic knowledgeof Scotland was collected and circulated, and howScottish travel books were pieced together, in andfrom Enlightenment Edinburgh.

Following his earlier A Tour inScotland 1769 (published in 1771;hereafter Tour),Pennant wrote from his home in Wales to Paton inEdinburgh in December 1771: