Traditional Buildings and Life in the Lake District - Erstausgabe

The Lake District's unique and apparently natural beauty has inspired people for centuries. Although its valleys, fells and lakes are the foundation of its appeal, the region as we know it is very much a lived-in landscape, shaped as much by the hand of man as by nature. The pattern of settlement, and the use of the fells and valley bottom lands, has changed comparatively little over the last two thousand years. Much of the Lake District is now a historic landscape of considerable importance. Susan Denyer shows with great skill how the landscape can be read and interpreted to throw light on the way the inhabitants of the Lake District lived and worked over the last three centuries. The book combines the results of building and landscape surveys with information culled from local records. It describes how the layout and disposition of houses and farm buildings with their furniture and fittings, together with human stories both tragic and humorous, illuminate the realities of everyday life: how homes were heated and lit, where and how people slept, what food was prepared and eaten, how animals were housed and crops grown. This is a memorable book which will take its place among the classics on the Lake District and on the significance and importance of traditional buildings. The National Trust protects more than a quarter of the Lake District National Park, looking after not only the historical landscape but also many hundreds of traditional farms and farm buildings. As the Trust's Historic Buildings Representative in the North-West, Susan Denyer has been able to draw upon the detailed building and landscape surveys made by the Trust in the Lake District. Similar surveys have been made by other regional offices of the National Trust and it is hoped this book will be the first of a series covering vernacular buildings in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.