In British history there exists a correlation between changes in geopolitical landscapes and rejuvenated interest in antiquarianism. In the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries, when land was redistributed from the Church to individuals, families used ecclesiastical objects to prove a legitimate local connection and claim right to former Church lands. For these individuals, the reactionary defacement of tombs and other ecclesiastical objects during the period spurred a sense of a disappearing past that required preservation. Likewise, the decades after the Jacobite 1754 rebellion saw the political, economic and cultural colonization of the Scottish Highlands. A resurgence in antiquarian interest and the founding of several antiquarian societies marked the second half of the eighteenth century. As argued by Angela Byrne in Geographies of the Romantic North, Napoleonic upheaval to the south and the threat of Revolutionary invasion cultivated a resolve to distance Britain historically from its southern neighbours. The North, both New World and Old, was used to establish a cultural heritage in relief. Essentially, Byrne explores late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century perceptions and representations of Northern regions, and the ways in which British explorers and antiquarians embodied and identified with ‘Northern-ness'.

The book divides into three parts. The first examines the concepts and definitions of the North, and its popular and romantic appeal among the British. The second section discusses the role of the North in the formation of national and regional identities, particularly in relation to antiquarian studies. The final part of the book considers geographies of the North in exploration. While the treatment of material is at times uneven, the book offers a good overview of concepts of the North as understood in terms of geography, identity and cultural objects. Some chapters devote extensive discussion to secondary literature, which effectively diminishes the quality of the author's argument and engagement with historical material. For instance, it is unclear how an environmental aesthetics, as Byrne describes it, enriches historical and romantic understandings of British Northern experiences. As late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century climate theory is a cornerstone for much of Byrne's analysis, it would have been helpful to see how antiquarians and explorers exercised climate theory in their studies of Northern indigenous cultures.

One of the problems that Byrne wants to address in her study is what constitutes adequate direct experience for natural history and antiquarianism within a culturally defined geography such as the North. The policing of scientific contributions, as outlined by Bryne, produced divisions between amateur and ‘professional’ groups. Evidence of identity problems of similar sorts existed in other areas of knowledge making. James Stuart, the first person to measure and record the ancient Greek ruins of the Parthenon, used the ‘picturesque’ as a pejorative category to describe the work of his competitor Robert Adams, even though Stuart's own publication plainly operated within a picturesque vocabulary. Such troubled and inconsistent definitions likewise existed for the scientific traveller. That the role of visceral experience in fieldwork is not addressed within debates about a traveller's scientific identity proves unsatisfactory. As suggested by the book's title, a romantic aesthetics plays a significant role in imagined geographies, as well as the reliability of witnessing and scientific exploration. Its inclusion within the identity of the traveller would have better grounded the historical figures examined. Given the rise of industry and consumer markets during the period that Byrne examines, the virtues of physicality and the aesthetically attuned mind provide a potentially interesting connection that might be further explored.

Byrne's claim that curiosity and singularity are categories that transcend a dependency on the aesthetics of the sublime or picturesque, and create a richer understanding of landscape, is very troubling. The author does not engage in debates or definitions of picturesque or sublime, and the expected sources of picturesque literature – such as Michael Rosenthal et al.'s edited volume Prospects for the Nation (1997) and Stephen Copley and Peter Garside's edited volume The Politics of the Picturesque (1994) – are missing from the bibliography. Though older studies, these two texts remain extremely useful for thinking critically about the meaning of aesthetic categories. It is unclear how or why the picturesque and the sublime are problematic for Byrne's discussion, and how curiosity and singularity offer a more nuanced interpretation of history, especially since Barbara Maria Stafford argues in Voyage into Substance (1984) that the picturesque is attention to singularities. If Byrne wanted to read further studies about science, travel and curiosity, she perhaps should have consulted Nigel Leask's Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (2002).

The most interesting contribution of the book, unfortunately, is presented in the conclusion, where Byrne briefly touches on the role of dreams in the Northern travellers' experience. This topic offers exciting potential for exploring how scientific travellers internalized experience and suggesting how travellers became absorbed by strange settings encountered on their expeditions. By contrast, the North as a dreamscape would be an excellent avenue for considering the superstitious nature of the British traveller. Overall, Geographies of the North deals with a range of rich materials but the arguments remain truncated and deserve more detailed engagement.