This anonymous tour of 1810 (possibly the work of one T. Winfield) is distinguished from the relative profusion of manuscript Scottish travels in this period by its author’s mode of transport. Eschewing the by now well-trodden ‘petit tour’ of Perthshire and Argyll, the writer and his companions, clearly being of some means, charter a sloop in Liverpool to sail them round the Hebrides. The resulting journey, shaped by tide and wind, as well as an injunction to stay south of the Butt of Lewis to avoid hostile Danish vessels, bears the imprint of Thomas Pennant’s Voyage to the Hebrides 1772, as well as, to a lesser extent, Johnson and Boswell’s Hebridean tour of 1773. The text narrowly qualifies as a four-nations tour, departing from England and touching on Anglesey in Wales and County Antrim in Ireland before making for the Hebrides. There, the tourists take in Oban and its surroundings, before navigating to Mull, Staffa, Iona, Skye and the Outer Hebrides. The tour is primarily of interest as a document of the ever increasing popularity of Hebridean tourism, set against the backdrop of the convulsive failure of the Highland social system. Accounts of failed fisheries and the familiar primitivist accounts of Highlanders and their dwellings, appear alongside anecdotes of fading clan loyalty and large-scale emigration, contributing to a picture of decline at odds with a growing appreciation for the region’s tourist sites. Of particular note is the author’s visit to the Spar Cave of Skye, later made famous by Walter Scott in his narrative poem The Lord of the Isles (1815). In fact, the author of this tour records meeting Dr Kenneth MacLeay of Oban, whose description of the cave brought it to public notice several years before Scott’s poem. As such, this text might be seen to represent a watershed between the virtuosic eighteenth-century tradition of Highland travels represented by Pennant, and a nineteenth-century model of tourism, based on the imbrication of landscape and literary romance accomplished in Scott’s poems and novels.