The Curious Travellers Project

Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) developed an incredible body of work over the course of his lifetime, spanning natural history, antiquities and travel. His British Zoology was internationally acclaimed, and his Tours of Britain played a foundational role in the birth of tourism in the country.

The Curious Travellers project is a collaboration between the University of Wales Trinity St David, Glasgow University and the Natural History Museum. It focuses on Pennant’s extensive correspondence, zoological writings and specimen collections, as well as his publications: Tour in Scotland (1769), Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides (1772) and Tours in Wales (1778-83).

Pennan was from Flintshire in north-east Wales and worked closely with Welsh and Gaelic speakers in compiling his Tours of those countries. They were highly influential, providing descriptions of the cultural, economic and environmental conditions of both countries. New online editions of these works will be published in 2026.  

Pennant’s travels and his collaborative networks underpin both his British Zoology (1766, and many subsequent editions) and his natural history collections, which are now held at the Natural History Museum. These collections, comprising birds, fossils, minerals, and shells, many of which are type specimens, are among the earliest documented natural history collections in the Museum.

The richness of the Pennant archive is allowing us to reconnect specimens with their original contexts. Correspondence, watercolours, engravings and publications offer insights into provenance and habitats, and show how travel and travel-writing informed eighteenth-century knowledge practices.    

Curious Travellers has itself been involved in many collaborations. Staff from the Natural History Museum led a crowdsourcing project exploring the richly illustrated copies of Pennant’s tours at the National Library of Wales.

Project researchers have studied Pennant’s extraordinary Outlines of the Globe, an imaginary journey across continents, held at the National Maritime Museum. The project has curated exhibitions at the Greenfield Valley Heritage Site and the Gilbert White House and Gardens Museum in Selborne. Two creative commissions have involved schools and ensured wider community engagement with Pennant, his work and influence.

The Museum’s role in the project

Lisa Cardy led the collaboration with the National Library of Wales (NLW) crowdsourcing team to generate links between the digital editions of the Tours in Wales and Scotland and NLW’s digitised extra-illustrated tours.

Connecting text and images provides new research data for the editorial team and greatly enhances NLW’s existing digitised resource. 

Dr Edwin Rose has acted as a Museum researcher, focusing primarily on Pennant’s internationally renowned British Zoology and highly ambitious Arctic Zoology, an attempt to describe, from written sources and correspondents, the fauna of America, Canada and the Arctic.

Stephanie Holt, from the Centre for UK Nature, joined the Museum team in 2025, having previously acted in an advisory capacity. Her work on Pennant’s correspondent, the Selborne naturalist Reverend Gilbert White (1720-1793), led her to publish an edition of White’s original letters to Pennant for Curious Travellers Digital Editions.

Working closely with curators across departments, she has helped to reconnect and raise awareness of the importance of the Pennant collection and its value for research. She curated the temporary exhibition Curious Minds: Thomas Pennant and Gilbert White at the Gilbert White House and Gardens in 2025.

Stephanie continues to work on the project with Professor Mary-Ann Constantine, exploring future funding opportunities, and planning events celebrating Pennant’s tercentenary on the 14 June 2026. Initial phases of a Virtual Cabinet of Curiosities highlighting some of Pennant’s collections at the Natural History Museum will be released later this year.

Thomas Pennant

Thomas Pennant was born and lived at the family estate of Downing Hall near Whitford in north-east Wales. He was educated in Wrexham and Oxford.

Pennant’s publications on natural history include such works as British Zoology, the History of Quadrupeds, and Arctic Zoology. He was a fine observer in the field and collected specimens of plants, minerals, birds and animals. But his knowledge of the natural world also came from a wide international network of leading scientific figures of his day.

His correspondents included figures such as Linnaeus, Buffon, Peter Pallas, Joseph Banks and Gilbert White. Many of these contacts were formed during a tour of Europe he made in 1765.

Pennant was a passionate antiquarian with a deep curiosity about the British past. But he was also an enthusiast for economic improvement and a champion of burgeoning industry, with a lead mine and smelting houses on his own estate.

He travelled around Britain on horseback, on foot, and, in the Western Isles, by boat, and it is this immediacy of experience, combined with his many and varied interests, which makes his tours such fascinating reading.

Highly influential on later travellers to Wales and Scotland, they are rich in observations and descriptions which bring the vibrant complexities of eighteenth-century Britain to life.

His long-standing patronage of the artist Moses Griffith and others such as John Ingleby and Paul Sandby ensured that these written descriptions were matched with a superb range of landscapes and miniatures, many painted directly into lavish extra-illustrated versions of the tours.

He was married twice: in 1759 to Elizabeth Falconer (d. 1764), and in 1778 to Ann Mostyn of Mostyn Hall, the estate adjacent to Downing. He had two children from each marriage, and his eldest son, David, inherited the estate.

When he died at the age of 72, he was a recognised literary figure and had become, by a nice irony, a feature on the itinerary of his own tour.