Читать книгу The Lune Valley and Howgills. 40 scenic fell, river and woodland walks онлайн

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In 1772 Lancaster’s quay was busy with ships, and Gilpin ventured a little way upriver to describe its passage through Lonsdale. His words might very well apply today, ’where quietly, and unobserved, it winds around projecting rocks – forms circling boundaries to meadows, pastured with cattle – and passes through groves and thickets, which in fabulous times, might have been the haunt of wood-gods. In one part, taking a sudden turn, it circles a little, delicious spot, forming into a peninsula called vulgarly, “the wheel of Lune”.’

Three years earlier while on his way to Settle, Thomas Gray had gazed up the valley towards Ingleborough and been moved to pen ’every feature which constitutes a perfect landscape of the extensive sort is here not only boldly marked, but in its best position’. JMW Turner stayed a little longer to capture the scene at the Crook o’Lune and painted a landscape from beside the church at Kirkby Lonsdale. The picture so impressed Ruskin that he took the trouble to go and see for himself and the spot became known as ’Ruskin’s View’ and not Turner’s.