This image of tourists before a view of Dunster Castle highlights the importance assigned to the interaction of persons with natural or constructed elements of the landscape in Romantic-era tourism. Gilpin’s inclusion of human figures in this view of Dunster Castle departs from the way in which he represents tours of the River Wye. The figures in the corner of the image (with their backs to us) are engaged in business of their own, not observant of the scene that Gilpin presents to his reader and viewer. If they were looking at the castle, they might provide a model for the viewer who seeks to enter the scene.

In the center background, a man-made structure—appearing, though distant, to be composed of walls and towers—crests an imposing promontory. To the right of this bluff a high, wooded hill rises to the top corner of the image; trees cluster at its base. Two human figures appear on a hillock in the left foreground: one standing, the other crouching, head bent. In the grassy areas extending to the right, a cluster of four trees stands in the middle ground.

Kim Michasiw notes that one of Gilpin’s objectives was to make the domestic British landscape attractive for the generation deprived of the Grand Tour (on the Continent) due to the political strife of the late nineteenth century. Michasiw suggests that, by following the ideals of landscape painting, Gilpin could recreate an interaction between landscape and viewer that would enthrall the spectator, inviting him or her into the created, illusionistic space. Furthermore, human figures could be included to highlight the sublime qualities of the natural scene, but only in so far as they did not detract from the power of the sublime scene by engaging the viewer. For example, any persons included in an image were turned away from the viewer so as not to distract him or her from the scene itself (Michasiw 84-6). The scene follows this design, but adds a further complication. Busy with their own affairs, neither looking at the prospect of Dunster nor engaging with the viewer, these figures more closely resemble proprietors than tourists. Michasiw identifies such an "improper" and irreverent audience as the target readers of Price and Payne Knight, not those domestic tourists to whom Gilpin hoped to appeal (86); as a result, the figures in the image attract (and distract) our attention.

Clear identification of the figures is, however, a limited endeavor. They may be proprietors, but they could also be "read" as tourists sitting down to draw a sketch or paint a watercolor of the landscape before them. Regardless of their intended role, this view of Dunster presents both the pair of occupied figures and the castle as images with which the viewer may engage. Consequently, the image breaks away from common standards of landscape painting, and the personal affairs of the proprietors or tourists become as important as the purported focus on the picturesque vista.

By the 1790s, the British aristocrats who had grown accustomed to visiting the sites of ancient Greece and Italy had been cut off from the Continent by the violent and unstable political situation (Andrews 34). As a result, domestic sites came to constitute a new "Grand Tour." Gilpin highlighted the affordability of travel in England, Wales and Scotland, and argued that such national sites held the potential for enacting moral edification (Bermingham 86). This potential arose in the exposure of the viewer to the divine in nature: "a search after beauty should naturally lead the mind to the great origin of all beauty . . . Nature is but a name for an effect, / Whose cause is God" (Gilpin, Three Essays; 46-7).