1821 - ‘This is my own, my native land’

The Lake District can belong to anyone. For the native people, though, the love of place is not a choice: ‘‘whether their lot allows them to remain at home, or they are driven to try their fortune in the great world…they always feel an ardent attachment to their native vales and mountains’.

And although to a tourist or a ‘stranger’, Ambleside ‘certainly has not the general appearance of a modern village, at least, of a modern English village’, the same tourist may come to recognise that they too belong to this place, that ‘This is my own, my native land’. What the Picturesque Tour leaves unsaid is that these patriotic words about the English Lakes belong to Scottish poet Walter Scott.

Theodore Henry Fielding & John Walton, A Picturesque Tour of the English Lakes, 1821.