Tour

Abstract: This essay ruminates on the word tour, noun and verb, and its origin in the French language. Ireland, as a sometime colony, has been well toured since the seventeenth century, and was particularly precocious in using tours to drive external perceptions of the country. As circumnavigation preceded interior exploration across all empires, islands became paradigmatic for structuring tours, their clear figures converted into spatial circuits. The essay uses eighteenth-century dance notation, plans of the Phoenix Park's maneuvers, and the Border Commission's twentieth-century design in order interrogate tourism's colonial, military, and aesthetic mindsets. It ends with the case of cartographer and artist Tim Robinson, in whose work languages, maps, and places are provocatively overlaid.