Wales

This chapter focuses mainly on travel writing from inside Wales, describing some of the ways in which these narratives record encounters that challenged and often transformed regional and parochial identities. Such travel narratives written from the inside place more emphasis on geography – on the landscape, the contours of the regions, the topographical boundaries and markers – than on the people within. The more frequent and more specific the place-names mentioned in a text, the more familiar the region is to the writers who map the terrain of their own homelands. In contrast, examples of accounts of travel into Wales from the outside exemplify the kinds of stereotypical and colonialist thinking about Wales and the Welsh people that kept it subject to the hegemonic power of England. From the outside, Wales is an undifferentiated land typically constructed as mysterious, even rebarbative, hostile to outsiders and difficult to navigate, while the Welsh themselves are untrustworthy and belligerent rebels whose very existence threatens the unity of the English kingdom.