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I spent years studying Victorian literature before I came to work in the Lake District, and what I noticed when I started leading tours here is that the landscape and the literature are inseparable in a way that almost nowhere else in England can match.
Wordsworth was not describing a backdrop. He was making an argument about this specific place and what it does to the people who grow up in it and spend their lives in it. The argument is in the poems, but it is also in the landscape — in the Norse names, in the peel towers, in the five-thousand-year-old stones on the hillside east of Keswick that were standing here when someone first thought to write something down.
This is what I mean when I say the Lake District is never just scenery.
I think about the Lake District as a series of overlaid layers, each of which is still visible in the present landscape if you know where to look.
The Neolithic layer: Castlerigg, the axe factory sites on the Langdale Pikes, the stone circles of the Eden Valley. These people moved across this landscape ten thousand years ago and left monuments that are still in the places they chose with evident care and knowledge.
The Norse layer: the place names, the farming patterns, the sheep. The Norse settlers named this landscape in the ninth century and their vocabulary is still in use. You drive past it, you walk past it, you sleep in farms with Norse names.
The literary layer: Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, Beatrix Potter, Arthur Ransome, John Ruskin. The Lake District produced or attracted more significant writers per square mile than almost anywhere in English literary history. The literature and the landscape are in continuous dialogue.
When I am leading a tour — whether it is a Wordsworth tour or a history bespoke day or a general Lakes tour — I am trying to make these layers visible and simultaneous. The farm we pass has a Norse name, stands on a site that has been farmed for at least a thousand years, and was described by Wordsworth in a poem that most people in the vehicle recognise. These things are not separate. They are the same place.
When the layers become visible — when you understand that the landscape you are looking at is not just beautiful but historical and literary and geological and ecological all at once — it becomes a different kind of experience from landscape tourism. It becomes the experience of understanding something.
People sometimes ask me, at the end of a tour, whether they should read the Prelude or visit Sizergh or learn something about the Norse place names before they come back. The answer is yes to all three. But actually what I tell them is: come back. Come back in a different season, with a different question, with something you have read since the last time. The Lake District rewards return in a way that very few places do, because there is always more to understand.
Gillian leads the Wordsworth tours and bespoke history and literary tours. Contact us to discuss a bespoke day.