Before you have time to reach for your hiking boots, Hunter Davies spirits you from the shores of Lake Windermere back in time to Wordsworth and family at "Dove Cottage" in Grasmere, up the fells with Coleridge and his inkpot, and into Beatrix Potter's world, where her real love turns out to be not so much bunnies as breeding Herdwick sheep. Davies spent a year in the 1970s walking and talking his way through Britain's Lake District, and this book - first published in 1979, now with an updated introduction - is the result. He carries you effortlessly up the likes of Scafell Pike (and High Pike with Chris Bonington - in wellies), with plenty of sidetracks into local literary history. You're likely to lag behind one climber - Joss Naylor. He's a local shepherd who broke the record for fell-running - taking in 72 peaks of over 2,000 feet in just 24 hours. But apparently he'd rather run a campsite than be a shepherd. So much for the romantic Lakelands way of life.
