1777 - ‘everything that can instruct or interest’

Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn’s carefully researched history of the Lake District was not intended as a guide for travellers, yet it has moments of enthusiastic landscape description that would delight any tourist. Victorian Lake District historian George Atkinson commented in 1849 that that these volumes have stood without rival because their ‘minute descriptions’ contain ‘everything that can instruct or interest’.

Shown here is the volume by Richard Burn devoted to his native Westmorland, opened to Thomas Kitchen’s extraordinarily detailed country map of Westmorland. Can you find Grasmere (or ‘Gresmere’ as it is spelled here) marked on the map?

Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn, The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, 2 vols, 1777.