Thus the thoughtful narrator of Joseph Conrad's great novel, seated cross- legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen mast, with the luminous Thames estuary stretching ahead of him, and the darkness looming behind. Conrad's tightly controlled masterpiece, where every word carries its freight of enig- matic meaning, is perhaps an odd match with Pennant's abundant confu- sion of narrative voices, where deeper meaning can often appear as much the product of happenstance as intention. And though both are narratives of travel, it is perhaps too glib to compare ‘a journey to the remotest part of North Britain, a country almost as little known to its southern brothers as Kamtschatka’ with Marlow's journey into the ‘place of darkness’ in the heart of Africa; a more historically appropriate exotic shadowing of the Scottish tour, as Pat Rogers has shown, would be the exactly contemporaneous explo- ration being undertaken by Pennant's friends and Royal Society colleagues in the Southern Hemisphere. Nevertheless, like Conrad's novel, Pennant's Tours, both in Scotland and Wales, reveal interesting moments when the Roman conquest of Britain pushes its way to the surface of a story about modernity: and both are, undeniably, troubled by their Roman predecessors.

This chapter looks at some examples of Pennant's dealings with the Roman world, both through artefacts encountered on his travels, and through the prism of his Classics-based education, to consider how ideas about Roman Britain may have shaped his perceptions of the multicultural roots of the modern British Isles. His evident fascination with this period of British history, one shared by fellow antiquaries throughout the century, is complicated by contemporary political narratives: while his Unionist inclinations approve the drawing together of the peripheries under a benign and improving larger whole, the echoes of violence and oppression from the distant past unsettle him. Looking at Pennant's treatment of the Romans in both the Scottish and the Welsh Tours also helps to articulate certain interesting differences in his approach to the two countries; and offers new ways of understanding the nature of his travel writing.