‘Kilts Versus Breeches’: The Royal Visit, Tourism and Scottish National Memory Eric G.E. Zuelow 1 West Liberty State College George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822 not only involved the royal entourage but also attracted thousands of ordinary people to Edinburgh. These early tourists encountered a largely invented spectacle of Scottish history and traditions that was designed to create a unified memory of the national past, despite the reality of a sharp division between Highlands and Lowlands. This article examines how the tourist gaze helped shape a new Scottish national memory and identity. Tourist, tourism, collective memory, national identity, tartanry, Scotland, consumption, guidebook. Warm, sunny weather greeted the thousands of people who lined the road between Leith and Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh on 15 August 1822. A tremendous air of excitement hung over streets awash with animated chatter; a clamour all the more notable for its mixture of the broadest dialect of the Lowlands in discord with the twang of Gaelic, and the sharp and shrill pipe of Aberdeen. At 11:30a.m., the sound of a distant bagpipe joined the buzz of the crowd. Then everything went strangely silent, the expectation of what was to happen next evidently taking hold. Just past noon, a cannon fired. King George IV had boarded his barge and was heading for shore. The royal visit was underway (Morning Chronicle, 19 August 1822). The events that unfolded over the next two weeks are well known. King George IV, the first English monarch to visit Scotland since 1633, encountered a series of events that Sir Walter Scott, perhaps the most popular novelist in the world during the early nineteenth century, carefully JOURNEYS VOL. 7 ISSUE 2: 33–53 doi: 10.3167/jys.2006.070203 ISSN 1465-2609 (Print), ISSN 1752-2358 (Online)