English Journeys Through England On A Side Saddle by Celia Fiennes

Ely, for instance, is “a harbour to breed and nest vermin”.ģ. There are stately homes, but there are also towns and cities, and acerbic verdicts on places she didn’t like. Her account of these journeys – first published as Through England on a Side Saddle – is one of the founding works of British travel writing. For a woman to travel around the country, on horseback, in the late 17th and early 18th century, was revolutionary in itself. Think of a place in Britain you know and love, and there is a fair chance Celia Fiennes will have been there 300 years before you. The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685–c.1712 (ed Christopher Morris, 1995) (“The blackened city sails in an ocean of white cloud, perpetually racing before the wind.”)Ģ. Her visit to her home town of Liverpool - more memoir than reportage - is particularly moving. The fact that she was accompanied by a film crew of six men and one woman does not detract from her distinctive voice, which is funny and self-deprecating. Fifty years later, in the depths of another recession, Bainbridge set out in Priestley’s footsteps. JB Priestley’s English Journey, which he described as “a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and thought and felt during a journey through England in the autumn of 1933”, was the first Great Depression-era travelogue, preceding Orwell’s.

English Journey, or The Road to Milton Keynes by Beryl Bainbridge Beryl Bainbridge flying into Albert Dock in Liverpool in 1990.

English Journeys Through England On A Side Saddle by Celia Fiennes