A LITERARY GUIDE TO THE LAKE DISTRICT
Walk and drive to inspiring places - the famous and the little-known

Grevel Lindop

A complete guide to the Lake District’s literary connections from earliest times to the present day, illustrated and arranged in five easy-to-follow routes for walkers and drivers.
Recognised as a classic when first published, this is a fully revised and updated edition of an essential guide for all lovers of the Lake District.
The immense literary significance of this much loved National Park makes walking so much more interesting when you have at your fingertips such fascinating and detailed information.
Divided into five very user-friendly areas including the National Park and the Cumbrian coast, the guide is enhanced by specially-drawn maps and archive illustrations.

One of the most thorough and readable guides to the Lake District, this new edition has been fully revised and updated and includes material based on original local and historical research not generally available. It follows five major routes; each is divided into shorter sections by subheadings, clearly laid out, with easy-to-follow maps and clear, detailed directions. Indexes of places and of people make it easy to find the literary associations between them.
Visitors to the Lake District may already know that William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Dove Cottage, Grasmere in 1799. But they may not know where to find the places they wrote about, the walks they took and the views they loved. This book will guide readers to all these places, and to those that inspired Wordsworth’s friends and followers – Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Keats, Shelley and many more.
The values portrayed in Wordsworth’s poem The Excursion, were to attract the well-known artist, critic and ecologist John Ruskin to the Lake District many times before he finally settled at Brantwood in 1872. In his wake came H D Rawnsley (who with Beatrix Potter founded the National Trust), W G Collingwood (Lakeland archaeologist and historian) and his friend Arthur Ransome, then a journalist, later famous for his Swallows and Amazons series. Thomas Hardy and Dickens, Edward Thomas and D H Lawrence, Hugh Walpole, Wainwright and Melvyn Bragg have all been inspired or stimulated by the Lakes, and their literary locations and adventures are chronicled here place by place.
The literary history alone makes fascinating reading but to have the opportunity to walk with the writers, experience what inspired them, and to discover new and enlightening facts about the archaeology, geology and various industries that have shaped this wonderful landscape together make this a unique read.