Instead of going over the Dunmail Raise to Ambleside by the road over which we shall return to Keswick, let us go thither by another route; we will take train for Penrith, thence we will drive to Pooley Bridge, and so by Ullswater to Patterdale, and over the Kirkstone Pass. (p. 1)

After leaving the station we have a last view of Windy Brow, with its Calvert associations, above the wall of wood on the left.  We get a last peep on the right, too, of Chestnut Hill of Shelley memory, and after threading the echoing defile, and thundering over the bridges of “sinuous Greta,” we pass the entrance of the valley which Richardson the poet schoolmaster loved so well, and Sir Walter Scott made famous, “the narrow valley of St. John,” and win the quiet beauty of the “lonely Threlkeld’s waste and wood,” and the wild swells of Matterdale Common. (pp. 1-2)

Away to our right, beneath Wanthwaite Crags, above the Threlkeld Quarry, lie the remains of the old Pictish village of prehistoric date, and we sight a little further on, a spur of Helvellyn, the Wolf-Crag as it is called, that takes us back to the time when the wolf ravened hereabout.  Yonder rising ground to the north-east, beyond Troutbeck Station, preserves to us, possibly, a memory of the days when bears, as well as wolves, prowled round.  “Bernier,” it is averred, means “the Bear-warrior,” so we are taken back to a far distant past, as we speed upon our way. (p. 2)

But our eyes are attracted by the deep-trenched gorges to the left, and the splendid pyramidal-shaped buttress of great Blencathra.  There is no mountain side in Cumberland so full of majesty.  Its quaint-ridged shoulder, its deep purple-dark clefts, its mottling of wondrous sun and shadow, its glory of wild heather melting into southern-hearted pastures, all combine to bid us gaze, and gaze again.  Still more does it appeal to us, because just there, in that old clump of birch and hazel, stood at one time the Hall of “Sir Lancelot Threlkeld,” who, as Southey tells us, in his Colloquies with Sir Thomas More, “after John, Lord Clifford (the Clifford of Shakespeare’s drama), was slain at Ferry Bridge, and his lands seized and his property attainted by the triumphant House of York, married his widow, Margaret Brornflett, Baroness Vesey, and was, as the records of the family say, ‘a very kind and loving husband to her, helping to conceal her two sons.’” (pp. 2-3)

(Literary Associations of the English Lakes, Vol. II, pp. 1-3)