O JOY FOR ME!

It was from the 1740s onward that cartographers, poets and artists had begun to give outsiders some idea of what the Lakeland landscape of mountains and valleys, lakes, rivers and waterfalls actually looked like. The Romantic movement with its cult of the 'sublime' and of the 'picturesque' made the mountainous regions of Wales, the Lake District and even Scotland more fashionable for visitors to admire for their 'beauty, horror and immensity'. But these tourists never left the well-beaten and recommended path nor ventured into the hills for themselves. Only miners and quarrymen or shepherds with sheep to find or pack-horse drivers did that, and when the first eccentric visitors asked to be guided to the summits, the locals were amazed and bemused. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wild, unconventional and physically fearless, arrived to join the Wordsworths in the Lakes in 1799, he immediately set out fell walking on his own. His records of these explorations in his notebooks and letters, particularly to his beloved but unattainable Sara Hutchinson, provided totally new and modern appreciation and understanding of the mountain landscape. Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Scafell and most of the now popular summits were visited by him alone, without maps or any equipment beyond his notebook in which he scribbled his impressions and his reactions. 'O Joy for me!' he jotted on first seeing Ullswater from the top of the Great Dodd. The book explores and explains the experiences of a true pioneer and captures the remarkable creative spirit of this great Briton. Chapters also cover his walks around Nether Stowey, Somerset between June 1797 to July 1798, his tour of the Harz mountains Germany, May 1799, at home at Greta Hall, Keswick 1800, Saddleback, Dungeon Ghyll Force, Coledale Fells, Walla Crag, Nab Scar and a nine day walk to the coast and back in August 1802 among them. Plus final walks with Sothey and Hazlitt through Borrowdale and the Fell wanderer Alfred Wainwright. Beautifully produced 194 pages with many modern colour photographs, line art and coloured maps.