A colourful journey through the Lake District

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A Tour of the English Lakes with Thomas Gray & Joseph Farington RA

By John R. Murray

At this time of year, when the days are short and the weather sharp, the perfect alternative to visiting England’s Lake District in thermals and waterproofs must be an armchair tour in the company of a wonderful travel writer, a creative painter and a knowledgeable guide. In A Tour of the English Lakes with Thomas Gray and Joseph Farington RA, John R. Murray guides us on Gray and Farington’s ventures through the villages, fells and valleys of the English Lakes in the mid-to-late 18th century. It’s a colourful journey.

In 1769, a year after the publication of his poem Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard, the poet and writer Thomas Gray (1716–71), embarked on a tour of the Cumbrian Lake District (known as ‘the English Lakes’ until the 19th century). He recorded his ventures in a journal that is recognized as the first modern example of travel writing. (Murray attributes this to the ‘freshness and immediacy’ of Gray’s account.) Following in Gray’s footsteps a few years later was the noted watercolourist, Joseph Farington, a Royal Academician (RA) who toured the English Lakes, recording picturesque views with topographical precision. In A Tour of the English Lakes with Thomas Gray & Joseph Farrington RA, the author brings together the Cumbrian journal and selected letters of Gray with the watercolours, engravings and diary of Farington, to link their experiences. He includes his own photographic record of the places the pair visited and despite a gap of 250 years between Farington’s illustrations and Murray’s photographs, many views astonishingly remain the same.

Gray, a Cambridge don, was a shy, timid man who enjoyed travel. In his twenties, from 1739–41, he embarked on a tour through France and Italy. In his later life he toured through Britain: to Suffolk in 1761; Southampton in 1764; Scotland, and Hartlepool in 1765; London and Kent in 1766–8; and Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1769. He kept notebooks of his travels. In 1993, John R. Murray inherited from his father, ‘six small Thomas Gray notebooks, each filled with his tidy handwriting and all housed in an elegant box made for them’. Murray’s love of Cumbria and first-hand climber’s knowledge of its mountains and fells, led him to look further into Gray’s 1769 journey to what we now call the Lake District.

After putting together a plan to follow Gray’s journey, Murray came across a volume of engravings ‘after drawings by Joseph Farington RA’, published by William Byrne in 1789, with a text in English and French by William Cookson of Penrith, Cumbria.  Born in 1747, Joseph Farington had trained as a landscape artist in the studio of Richard Wilson, becoming an RA in 1785. He knew of Gray’s travels through the English Lakes from his own copy of a 1775 edition of Gray’s writings, edited by the biographer William Mason. Farington decided to venture forth the same year, travelling to Keswick in October 1775. Two years later he repeated the journey, following in Gray’s footsteps and travelling further round the lakes than Gray had accomplished. Farington’s journey to capture in watercolour what Gray had written in text, inspired Murray to follow them both, to see how much, if any, the landscape had changed. He was informed by an album of Farington’s original watercolours at the Yale Center of British Art, New Haven , Connecticut, USA.

The book includes drawings and primary source sample pages from Gray’s journal.  To familiarize the reader local maps, taken from Thomas West’s superbly drawn A Guide to the Lakes, 1784, are provided throughout as illustration and exploration of the area.

The book’s cover image is taken from Farington’s View Looking North by Six-Mile Stone, painted with an impressive view of Saddleback closing off the end of the valley. Gray’s journeys through this valley is explored using his diary:

The road from Ambleside to Keswick affords a series of romantic and picturesque views. [...] The road passes a considerable way on the margin of that lake [Thirlmere] when it again becomes steep and winding; but the tediousness of Alpine travelling is compensated by the scene which opens from the six-mile stone

Farington’s watercolour of this area is shown with a 1789 engraving of it by E. Byrne and J. Landseer, with Murray’s photograph of the scene today set beneath.

As John Murray notes, the modern road still follows the route of the old road with the Rock of St John prominent. The view remains as beautiful today and near identical to Gray and Farington’s own visions of it. It is a wonderful experience – apart from physically seeing it oneself – to follow Gray’s text whilst exploring Farington’s watercolours and Murray’s photographs (taken in 2009–10). Whilst the idea of capturing the present-day views of 18th-century ‘tourist’ trails may not be new, Murray’s commentary and exploration into both men’s lives, added to his personal knowledge of Cumbria, creates a new perspective on this remarkable tour through the natural landscape of the ever-popular English Lakes.

A Tour of the English Lakes with Thomas Gray & Joseph Farington RA by John R. Murray is published byFrances Lincoln, 2011.7 maps, 39 watercolours and sepia sketches, 29 engravings, 33 colour photographs, £25.00/US$45.00.ISBN: 978-0-7112-3268-6