The journey began on August 2, 1705.  The party consisted of Mr. Taylor and his two friends, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Sloman.  They travelled on horseback, and often had difficulties with the poor beast that carried their luggage.  They reached Edinburgh in the evening of August 31, and left it on their return journey on September 8, and got home on the 25th of the same month.  The Itinerary concludes as follows: 

’Thus we spent almost 2 months in a Journy of many 100 miles, sometimes thro’ very charming Countryes, and at other times over desolate and Barren Mountaines, and yet met with no particular misfortune in all the Time.’

I may say at once of these three Itinerists—­Mr. Taylor, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Sloman—­that they appear to have been thoroughly commonplace, well behaved, occasionally hilarious Englishmen, ready to endure whatever befell them, if unavoidable; accustomed to take their ease in their inn and to turn round and look at any pretty woman they might chance to meet on their travels.  Their first experience of what the Itinerist calls ‘the prodigies of Nature,’ ’at once an occasion both of Horrour and Admiration,’ was in the Peak Country ’described in poetry by the ingenious Mr. Cotton.’  This part of the world they ‘did’ with something of the earnestness of the modern tourist.  But I hardly think they enjoyed themselves.  The ‘prodigious’ caverns and strange petrifactions shocked them; ’nothing can be more terrible or shocking to Nature.’  Mam Tor, with its 1,710 feet, proved very impressive, ’a vast high mountain reaching to the very clouds.’  This gloom of the Derbyshire hills and stony valleys was partially dispelled for our travellers by a certain ‘fair Gloriana’ they met at Buxton, with whom they had great fun, ’so much the greater, because we never expected such heavenly enjoyments in so desolate a country.’  If it be on susceptibilities of this nature that Mr. Cowan rests his case for thinking that the Itinerist can hardly have attained ’the blasted antiquity’ of fifty-eight, we must think Mr. Cowan a trifle hasty, or a very young man, perhaps under forty, which is young for an editor.

After describing, somewhat too much like an auctioneer, the splendours of Chatsworth, ‘a Paradise in the deserts of Arabia,’ the Itinerist proceeds on his way north through Nottingham to Belvoir Castle, where ’my Lord Rosses Gentleman (to whom Mr. Harrison was recommended) entertained us by his Lordship’s command with good wine and the best of malt liquors which the cellar abounds with’; the pictures in the Long Gallery were shown them by ‘my Lord himself.’  At Doncaster, ’a neat market-town which consists only in one long street,’ they had some superlative salmon just taken out of the river.  By Knaresborough Spaw, where they drank the waters and had icy cold baths, and dined at the ordinary with a parson whose conversation startled the propriety of the Templar, the travellers made their way to York, and for the first and last time a few pages of Guide Book are improperly introduced.  Then on to Scarborough.