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A Guide to the Lakes

Unabridged Audio Book

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Phil Benson

4 Hours 14 Minutes

LibriVox

January 2020

Audio Book Summary

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 WestÕs A guide to the Lakes (1778). WestÕs predecessors Ð Thomas Gray, Arthur Young, Thomas Pennant and William Hutchinson Ðhad 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 Ð a convex, tinted mirror in which the landscape appears as it might in a painting by Lorrain Ð West follows and improves upon GrayÕs technique of identifying ÔstationsÕ from which the landscape would appear at its most picturesque. WestÕs guide remains something of a hybrid, however, with its lengthy antiquarian descriptions of the surrounding towns of Lancaster, Penrith and Kendal.

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