The Shining Levels

'I have been a countryman all my life. I have had a straw in my mouth, a stick in my hand, and a dog at my heels almost from the day I could walk. As a child this made me a peculiar misfit because I was born and brought up in a Lancashire industrial town within sight of a coal tip.'

John Wyatt first encountered the Lake District during a boyhood camping trip to Windermere. He was overwhelmed by the freedom of the landscape and the closeness to nature he felt. It was as if he belonged here, a...