It is widely recognised that shifting perceptions of nature and the attributing of value to specific natural landscapes, such as the English Lake District, are processes that are shaped and influenced by various forms of cultural expression. In order to re-examine the complex interactions between cultural activity and our response to natural spaces, this chapter considers a body of written accounts of the Lakes landscape from a period during which its meanings and value were being radically revaluated, and before the deeply influential Wordsworthian construction of place had been fully established.

The Victorian art and social critic, John Ruskin, would outline a seminal concept of natural heritage in his book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). He writes that:

Though a significant milestone in the conceptualisation of nature as heritage, Ruskin's statement is itself shaped by the radical cultural shift in perceptions of nature which had begun to emerge a generation earlier. As Nicholson suggests:

This primary moment of rupture between man and the natural world around him generated new perspectives and ideas about nature which we can trace in the art and literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.