For over two centuries, the Langdales have attracted the interests of painters, poets and tourists. Prominent in the Romantic imagination, the crags and dales still draw thousands in each year; some to sketch and paint, others to ramble or to climb. The particular 'ways of seeing' have had a profound effect upon the area. But they are simply a small part of a story that extends back over several thousand years.

This book offers a sketch of a sequence that goes beyond the frame of the Romantic gaze. It traces how life has wound in different ways through the area from prehistory to the present. In particular, it follows a path across six thousand years to the Neolithic, when scattered groups travelled to the crags to make axe blades from a distinctive grey-green stone. Moving between prehistory and the more recent past, it traces the contours of the world in which those journeys were made, exploring what the crags meant to the people long before the invention of Sublime.