E nter any British stately home and there is a strong chance that you will find hanging on one of its walls the portrait of the eighteenth-century owner or his son depicted on his tour of the Continent. More often than not, the main figure will have a Roman view in the background, or a classical building, or an ancient statue or vase. The gentleman, sometimes with his family, sometimes with his tutor, was participating in what came to be designated as the Grand Tour. The nature of this tour has received considerable attention from historians, who have taken as their principal source the letters and journals of individual travellers. Some of these were published in the writer's lifetime, some later, and yet others remained in manuscript. Historians have used this material in different ways, sometimes adopting a biographical approach by describing the journeys of individuals, sometimes a geographical approach by writing chapters on each country passed through, sometimes a thematic approach by collating topics from a number of travelogues, and sometimes by combining one or more of these approaches. From these writings it is possible to gain an impressionistic view of this quintessentially British form of European tour: that it was largely the monopoly of the wealthy and aristocratic class, that it usually lasted a year or more, and that its most important destinations were first Rome and second Naples. The main participants were collectors purchasing antiquities and works of art, artists completing their professional education, upper-class families participating in a round of social activities with their compatriots and with the native upper classes, and young men under tutorial guidance 'finishing' the classical education they had received at home by examining the sites and buildings of Roman civilisation in situ and possibly picking up some modern language skills, above all in French, on the way. 1 However, few of those writing about the Grand Tour have offered any sharp definition of it. There is some measure of agreement over countries included in it, but less over the relative importance of each individual country. Mead 2 considered the route limited to France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and the Low Countries. Trease 3 and Hibbert 4 did the same, though Hibbert added Austria. Black found setting himself geographical confines problematic. He therefore decided to 'enlarge the scope of the work to include all British tourism in