Here are three special gift suggestions with substantial price reductions. These, and other items on the Amazon.co.uk site, will either save you money or enable you to buy something better than expected with what you intended to spend.

	Houses of The Lake District is a new, beautifully produced volume that will delight any lover of the Lake District. From Sizergh Castle and Levens Hall to Blackwell, Dove Cottage and Hutton-in-the-Forest the special buildings among the Cumbrian mountains and fells are pictured and described. Christopher Holliday and Clive Boursnell (author and photographer respectively) are to be congratulated on filling an important gap in the recent literature of the region. The houses themselves, along often with the families that built and have lived in them, are shown against the wonderful setting of this most beautiful corner of England. And just look at the price saving on Amazon – 31% off!
	Wainwright Walks, Series One & Two [DVD boxed set] with Julia Bradbury. These are no longer new, but retain their interest over the years. Whether or not you saw the original broadcasts these programmes will give hours of pleasure. £13.99, or there’s a special deal offering this along with Julia’s Coast to Coast and Railway walks.
	This Lake District Jigsaw Puzzle is just one of many available on the Amazon site. Assembling these beautiful scenes will give hours of enjoyment, especially on dark winter evenings, wetting the appetite for Lake District walks in the Spring and Summer – or if you’re the hardy type (and properly equipped!) even in the winter months.

For more ideas take a look at our Lake District books and DVDs site – The Lake District in Books

Yesterday I was in Lancashire attending the funeral of an old friend, and driving from the church to the cemetery passed the studio of landscape artist Keith Melling.

Keith Melling book - "An Artist in the Dales"

Click here or on the image to order from Amazon.

It was around this time last year that I mentioned Amazon.co.uk having Julia Bradbury’s “Wainwright Walks” DVDs (2 series from the BBC) on sale at half price.  Just now I was checking for some new Lake District products and spotted that they’re still available this year at that excellent price.

Looking a little further I discovered that Amazon.co.uk are also offering the boxed set of books at more than 50% discount:  Wainwright Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells

This year the English snow has come earlier and thicker than for many years. Here in Nottinghamshire we’ve not seen anything like it all the time we’ve lived here. The Lakeland mountains, however, are accustomed to their winter white clothing, and this has been captured well in a new photographic book Winter in the Lake District by Val Corbett.  This weekend I’m planning to spend a few days experiencing these sights directly on the spot in Cumbria, but if you can’t get there in person this book is a good long-distance alternative.

Today I’m turning my attention back to the English Lake District and a book published earlier this year that would make an excellent gift for anyone who loves this most beautiful corner of England.

In “Lake District Mountain Landscape” Alastair Lee has produced a remarkable assembly of outstanding views of the Cumbrian fells and mountains. A Westmorland Gazette reviewer wrote, “No-one leafing through this collection of inspirational images can fail to be impressed by the mood and majesty of the mountains that Lee has managed to capture through his lens.”

In addition to his great skill as a photographer, Lee is a climber, and this shows through in his treatment of many of the high peaks.

Whether you’re already a lover of the Lake District, are planning to visit in the future, or simply know someone who’s a Lakeland fanatic, this is a failsafe gift book either for them or for yourself.

Usually when I recommend a Lake District book it’s one that I already own myself. I prefer to do this so that the blog does not degenerate into an undiscriminating commercialism.

Today, though, I’m making an exception. Although I’ve seen and admired Mark Denton’s The Lake District: The Panoramas on a number of occasions, for some unaccountable reason I’ve never actually bought a copy. However, I’ve seen this book of remarkably beautiful photographs praised so many times that I’m putting it up here anyway.

This would make a marvellous gift for a friend or family member who loves the English Lake District, or even to introduce someone for the first time to this wonderful part of the country.

There’s no doubting that Mark Denton is an outstanding landscape photographer. He has worked not only on rural but also on city landscapes including books on Edinburgh and London.  You might also like to take a look at his Yorkshire volumes: Yorkshire Moors & Wolds and The Yorkshire Coast.

I have written several times recently about the River Ribble and its tributaries, especially the Hodder.   Now, here is a new book to enjoy.

The Ribble is substantially a Lancashire river, but in fact rises in the heights above the Yorkshire Dales. These are outstanding landscapes, walking-country par excellence, from the bleakness of the river’s origins to the lushness of the mid and lower stretches of the Ribble Valley, and out past the old Preston Docks to the estuary at Lytham.

This new volume, Landscapes of the Ribble, by photographer Andy Latham (it is his first book) will be a welcome addition to the library of any lover of the region and its rivers.

Book Details:
ISBN-10: 0711230285  -  ISBN-13: 978-0711230286
Publisher: Frances Lincoln (2010)
112 pages; hardcover; 26.8 x 25.4 x 2.4 cm
Cover price: £16.99

As of 15th January Landscapes of the Ribble was priced on Amazon.co.uk at only £9.54.

The end of last month saw the launch of a biography of Joss Naylor, the legendary Lake District fell runner from Wasdale.

He’s a man of 73 now, but in his early years was a pioneer of some of the roughest running in Britain. He once ran 72 Lake District fells inside 24 hours.  And not only in his early years!  Just four months ago, on behalf of a hospice charity, he ran 35 miles and climbed over 15,000 feet over the Buttermere peaks, and including Great Gable, Pillar, Skiddaw and Blencathra on the route.

Keith Richardson has now written a biography of Joss which tells not only of his running but also of his childhood in the bleak country above Wastwater, his life as a shepherd, and the social history of the wild country of Wasdale.  The book launch at The Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, was attended by almost 400 people

Unfortunately I can’t just now include a workable link to Amazon as they don’t currently have access to copies of the book.  Apparently a single bookshop has bought up all remaining copies from the publisher!  I do hope that it will be reprinted before long, and made more generally available.  You can, though, get Eric Robson’s recent DVD, Joss Naylor – Iron Man [2009].

For many years I’ve admired the photographs of W A Poucher (1891-1988), showing the beauties of the Lake District from many different aspects – and of course, his many illustrated guides covered far more than the Lakeland mountains.  His was a lover of the high places of all the countries in our islands.

Now there’s a book devoted totally to his life and his photography which should make an excellent gift this year for anyone who’s a lover of the English (and Welsh, and Scottish) countryside and landscape photographer par excellence.

“A Camera in the Hills” by Roly Smith is published by Frances Lincoln (ISBN-10: 0711228981; ISBN-13: 978-0711228986). It is profusely illustrated with both colour and black and white photography from his long years of recording our hills and mountains.

If you click on the link above or on the photograph you can order this splendid book from Amazon.co.uk.

It was the year before I was married. (I’ll let you work out when that was; I’m just indicating that it was well within living memory). Windermere was frozen over for several weeks during that winter, and for the first time in many years it was safe to skate over large areas of its surface.

Going back a bit further – that is, a few thousand years – not only was the lake frozen, but it was under several hundred feet of ice as the glaciers of the most recent ice age (I won’t say “the last”, as it might not be, in spite of what we’re told about global warming) …. Anyway, as I was saying, just over ten thousand years ago Windermere was under a massive glacier.

Strictly speaking that isn’t true, for at that time there was no Windermere. There were two much smaller lakes, one up at the Ambleside end, and another down toward Newby Bridge. In between the two, Claife Heights (now on the western side of northern Windermere) and Cartmel Fell (now on the eastern side of southern Windermere) were joined together in one continuous belt of hills, and the two lakes were in totally separate valleys ….. although both valleys were invisible under the cold solid white stuff.

As the glacier crawled its way down toward the sea at Morecambe Bay it carved a swathe through the hillside and allowed the waters of the two lakes (once they’d thawed, centuries later) to run together and create a single lake, the longest in England, that we now know and love as Windermere.

My bookcases have for decades now carried a wide range of books about the Lake District. However, I have very few that focus on just a single lake … because there are very few such books in existence. There is, however, an excellent book about Windermere: Portrait of Windermere, by Christopher Taylor. I bought mine twenty-five years ago when it first came out and have dipped into it repeatedly down the years. The paragraphs above owe much to my most recent dipping.   Click on the title or the graphic above to find a copy through Biblio.com

Or click on this link for more on other Lake District Books

That’s all for now,

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes

I have for many years found it fascinating to look at the different kinds of traditional buildings in the Lake District, Since the 1970s I have often carried with me a copy of R. W. Brunskill’s paperback field handbook, Vernacular Architecture of the Lake Counties.

Another book that has been on my shelves for more than twenty-five years is Palmer’s Historic Farmhouses in and around Westmorland, which I find especially interesting as my own forebears at various times down the centuries have lived in two of the featured properties.

An early-1990s work is Susan Denyer’s Traditional Buildings & Life in the Lake District, and even more recent (2006) is Brunskill’s Traditional Buildings of Cumbria.

Three of these can be found on the secondhand network although the Palmer book is rare and pricey (try our book search page at BrunleaBooks for access to several large networks of independent dealers around the world) whereas the latest Brunskill book can be bought new from Foyles of London, and when I last looked there was a good discount.

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes