A Guide to the Lakes: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

A Guide to the Lakes, credited to Thomas West, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of A Guide to the Lakes by Thomas West. Read in English by Phil Benson 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 West’s A guide to the Lakes (1778). West’s predecessors – Thomas Gray, Arthur Young, Thomas Pennant and William Hutchinson –had 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 – a convex, tinted mirror in which the landscape appears as it might in a painting by Lorrain – West follows and improves upon Gray’s technique of identifying ‘stations’ from which the landscape would appear at its most picturesque. West’s guide remains something of a hybrid, however, with its lengthy antiquarian descriptions of the surrounding towns of Lancaster, Penrith and Kendal. - Summary by Phil Benson

Recording facts

• Recording title: A Guide to the Lakes
• Author credits: Thomas West
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 14
• Listed recording duration: 4:14:55

Track guide

1. 01 - Introduction — 18:42
2. 02 - Lancaster — 42:18
3. 03 - Coniston — 13:21
4. 04 - Windermere — 23:13
5. 05 - Ambleside — 13:51
6. 06 - Keswick — 41:09
7. 07 - Bassenthwaite Water — 14:24
8. 08 - Buttermere, &c. — 12:19
9. 09 - Lowes Water — 16:29
10. 10 - Ullswater — 15:32
11. 11 - Hawes Water — 6:36
12. 12 - Penrith — 13:22
13. 13 - Kendal — 15:48
14. 14 - Addenda — 7:49

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.