“The best illustrated and most artistic guide to Lakeland I have read since the Blessed Wainwright gave up his pen….”
Hunter Davies ( Wainwright’s official biographer )
Book Two Breaking News….. over five thousand hours in the making, this second labour of love of illustrations, poems, essays and hand drawn maps to the best views of Windermere, Grasmere, the Langdales and Coniston will be released on November 15th this year.
Book Two (in the series of four), covering the whole of the Lake District takes you this time to the most beautiful views in the central and southern Lakes, with hand drawn maps on where to find them.
This book is about sharing the moments of beauty that I have been lucky to experience, both physically from the landscape and mentally as a by-product of walking over and in this special land. Beauty itself is everywhere, we just have to give ourselves the permission and the time to see it.
Drawings, poems, musings, stories and histories; a book of beauty, places of beauty.
Here for the first time are some of the illustrations from Book Two:
In 2015 a great friend of mine (let’s call him Dave B) decided to walk the 214 Wainwrights in one year to fund raise for a cancer charity in memory of his mother. On reaching many of the summits with him I felt some sense of deflation; there was no view, or a compromised view, or the view was better earlier or later on the walk.
Despite owning the Wainwright Pictorial Guides for a decade it wasn’t until reading Hunter Davies’ excellent biography of him that I realised every page was designed as a complete entity so the reader never had to turn over on a windy fell to find the information they needed. Additionally how he had rewritten the first 120 pages of Book One in order to justify the right hand margins; and how frustrated he was in trying to achieve perfection, eventually accepting that no matter what he did there would always be errors. His books are objects of beauty in themselves, and it was this framework that inspired me to make this guide to the best views in Lakeland as a supplement to his epic work.
The world class views in this book have been found on lake shores, on roadsides, on footpaths, in woodland, on the fell tops and in intimate scenes where man and the elements have interacted for millennia. The fells are amazing; you give your effort once and they repay you with memories that last a lifetime. Every drawing in this book stirs the mind’s eye and takes me back to who I was with and when. This book hopes to achieve two things; the first to be beautiful in its own right, the second to encourage the reader to explore and savour the world class scenery in this corner of the Lake District.
