Introduction

As Paul Evans has shown in this volume, Thomas Pennant's initial scholarly successes lay in the fields of zoology and Asian geography. Later, however, he was to earn fame and fortune by developing his own literary genre to promote readable, well- illustrated books on exploratory cultural travel in late eighteenth- century Britain. An important legacy to researchers, Pennant's landscape, site and artefact descriptions are unique records of information now often lost. Alongside many other archaeological records, they are being slowly absorbed into searchable, publicly accessible Heritage Environment Records (HERs) throughout Britain; and most pertinently to this investigation, into Wales's ‘Coflein’, and Scotland's sister database ‘Canmore’. These resources not only gather up- to- date data to facilitate archaeological research; they are also tools vital to informing national planning policies, guiding implementation in matters of preserving and conserving sites and landscapes. Adding new data to them demands scholarly judgement to ensure accuracy and reliability. Pennant's archaeological contributions – including his commissioned graphic images – therefore need careful scrutiny to establish the degree to which they truly represented first- hand familiarity with their subject matter.

One of the main purposes of this essay is to consider some of Pennant's working practices as a step towards establishing how such scrutiny may be most usefully progressed. It begins with a brief review of Pennant's education and early mentoring meant to offer insights into his development as an antiquary It goes on to include some preliminary observations about his encounters with notable monuments and artefacts and their discoverers. Whereas the graphic records of historic architecture he commissioned and many other aspects of his scholarship merit extended discussion, the present essay is limited to archaeological topics mainly of interest to prehistory. Finally, Pennant's works are evaluated as legacies to scholarship and as documents recording features of a fugitive and continuously fragmenting historic environment before sug- gestions are offered for future research directions.

Early Influences

Like many of the squirearchy, in youth Pennant would have had access not only to the select library his family had built up at Downing (which he greatly expanded), but also to the collections at nearby Mostyn Hall. In later life he recalled how the Classics were shelved there with ‘numerous […] books related to the Greek and Roman antiquities’.