It is now sixty years since Alfred Wainwright published the first of the seven volumes that make up his Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, detailing the 214 principal hills and mountains of the Lake District. Totalling more than 2,100 pages of meticulously hand-drawn and hand-lettered pages, the Pictorial Guides represent a "love letter" to a landscape that he had surveyed so definitively on foot and in ink. While the grandeur and poetry of the fells is unchanged since AW's day, the pace at which small changes may be encountered on the ground has never been greater. Walls, gates,...

One name above all others has become associated with walking in the Lake District: Alfred Wainwright, whose seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, first published in 1955-66, has become the definitive guidebook.

Wainwright's meticulously hand-drawn maps, diagrams and drawings take walkers up the 214 principal hills and mountains of the Lake District, describing the main routes of ascent from different starting points, as well as lesser-known variants, showing the summit viewpoint panoramas and the ridge routes that can be made to create longer walks. Every page...