This anonymous tour journal follows two travellers from Edinburgh to the island of Staffa, and ends abruptly on their return to Oban. An epigraph from Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, (1775) is followed by a quote from The Rambler in the opening paragraph and further references to the poetry of John Dyer and Erasmus Darwin, suggesting that this writer’s print inspirations tended, broadly speaking, towards a more belles-lettristic descriptive and reflective style, rather than natural-historical and antiquarian composite of Pennant’s Tours. The author’s self-presentation is knowingly quixotic, with the sublimity of moonlight boat trips and ‘the shades of the Fingalian heroes’ undercut by flea-ridden beds and ‘the mortification’ of eating oatcakes at shabby inns. The sense that the journey itself was an unplanned whim might be purely performative, but it is borne-out by the ad hoc nature of the forms of accommodation and transport described. The journal’s climax at the islands of Iona and Staffa includes reflection on the condition of the inhabitants of the former and the geological formation of the latter. However the overriding tone of the journal is that of an increasingly accessible form of leisured tourism based on literary taste, in contrast to the elite practice of the domestic tour as source and object of specialist knowledge.