A Guide to the Lakes
In the late eighteenth century, English writers discovered the landscape, not only in the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Salvator Rosa, but also as a place to be visited and viewed as if it were a picture. No part of England was more discovered in this period than the Lake District, which was transformed over the course of the next century from a remote region of farmland and inaccessible hills into a wild and romantic landscape of picturesque lake and mountain, described in works such as Thomas West’s A guide to the Lakes (1778). West’s predecessors – Thomas Gray, Arthur Young, Thomas Pennant and William Hutchinson –had merely passed through the Lakes. West, a resident of the Lakes, took the reader on a tour of the district as a whole, visiting all the lakes, with the sole exception of Wastwater. A devotee of the Claude glass – a convex, tinted mirror in which the landscape appears as it might in a painting by Lorrain – West follows and improves upon Gray’s technique of identifying ‘stations’ from which the landscape would appear at its most picturesque. West’s guide remains something of a hybrid, however, with its lengthy antiquarian descriptions of the surrounding towns of Lancaster, Penrith and Kendal. - Summary by Phil Benson
Genre(s): Travel & Geography
Language: English
Section | Chapter | Reader | Time |
---|---|---|---|
Play 01 | Introduction | Phil Benson |
00:18:42 |
Play 02 | Lancaster | Phil Benson |
00:42:18 |
Play 03 | Coniston | Phil Benson |
00:13:22 |
Play 04 | Windermere | Phil Benson |
00:23:13 |
Play 05 | Ambleside | Phil Benson |
00:13:51 |
Play 06 | Keswick | Phil Benson |
00:41:09 |
Play 07 | Bassenthwaite Water | Phil Benson |
00:14:24 |
Play 08 | Buttermere, &c. | Phil Benson |
00:12:19 |
Play 09 | Lowes Water | Phil Benson |
00:16:29 |
Play 10 | Ullswater | Phil Benson |
00:15:32 |
Play 11 | Hawes Water | Phil Benson |
00:06:36 |
Play 12 | Penrith | Phil Benson |
00:13:22 |
Play 13 | Kendal | Phil Benson |
00:15:49 |
Play 14 | Addenda | Phil Benson |
00:07:49 |