Nov 052012

Well, now it’s almost impossible to visit Windermere or Ambleside without seeing a copy of one of Wainwright’s guides to the Lake District. I had my first guide when I was 15 and several decades later, well thumbed and water damaged, I still use it.

Wainright developed a style of writing and drawing which I still find gives a better representation of a walk than a map or camera  ever capture. His combined text, maps and drawings were “multi-media” at least thirty years before the term was invented. So you find that he writes the description of a walk in terms of what you need to see and what you can see when you’re at a specific point on the journey. So they are both an invaluable aid to the journey and also a powerful memory aid when you look back on the journey because they are organised as a series of viewpoints.

All this and they are the right size to fit into the pocket of an anorak or pair of walking shorts comfortably.

The only caution is that the mapping of fells to books relies on the geography of the lakes with major divisions of the area are radial from the centre so that time spent in the centre of the Lake District easily overlaps several of the guides.

{adinserter Wainwright1}