The classic biography of Alfred Wainwright. Alfred Wainwright's unique hand-drawn and hand-written PICTORIAL GUIDES TO THE LAKELAND FELLS have been an inspiration to walkers for over forty years. Yet despite many bestselling books and three television series, Wainwright remained an intensely private person. With full access to Alfred Wainwright's private letters and unpublished material, Hunter Davies reveals a man more passionate, witty and generous than readers of his guides have come to expect. His biography throws a new and surprising light on a man who has been an enigmatic and misunderstood person.

Walking Home - Clare Balding's unmissable new book of Great British Adventures Clare Balding is on a mission to discover Britain and Ireland. She's conquered over 1,500 miles of footpaths, from the Pennine Way to the South-west Coast Path. As well as blisters and a twisted ankle, she's walked with extraordinary people - botanists, barefooted ramblers, whisky-drinking widowers... In Walking Home she shares these stories and tells of more (mis)adventures with her family and her wayward Tibetan terrier Archie. Along the way there are beguiling diversions and life-changing rambles. Finally, Clare embarks on the most important journey of all - the long walk home.

Wainwright: The Man Who Loved the Lakes is a celebration of the British landscape, and it tells the remarkable story of Alfred Wainwright who in 1952 decided to hand draw a series of guides to the fells of Lakeland. For the next 13 years he spent every weekend walking, and every weekday evening drawing and writing - completing one page per night. The result was Wainwright's Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells. Although initially self published they have now sold over a million copies and are still popular and much loved today. He went on to present a series of TV shows on the BBC about walking in the Lake District that made him even better known. He was an unlikely celebrity, he preferred his own company and thought walking in the countryside should be a solitary rather than group pursuit. Wainwright: The Man Who Loved the Lakes introduces him to a new generation of lovers of the countryside, features some of Wainwright's favourite walks and is lavishly illustrated, including stunning aerial shots of the Lake District.

Alfred Wainwright, the legendary fell walker and author of the incomparable and unique Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells was also a fluent, eloquent and diligent correspondent. Writing to old friends and to the many new ones gained through his books, and to his love, and later second wife, Betty, his letters display a much warmer, more sensitive and emotional character than his gruff popular image would suggest. Hunter Davies, Wainwright's biographer, has here collected a selection of letters that range from his early years in Blackburn to his established position as Borough Treasurer in Kendal, and cover all aspects of his professional and personal life, as well as the voluminous correspondence that was a consequence of writing and publishing the Pictorial Guides. The latter vividly illuminate many aspects of that turbulent but ultimately triumphant process, while the former present a picture of a dedicated public servant whose personal life had been deeply unhappy until late in life he found unexpected but transcendent love and happiness. In turn business-like and comic, wonderfully well informed and remarkably innocent, deeply moving and yet tough-minded, the letters present a vivid and unforgettable picture of one of the great but eccentric creative geniuses of the twentieth century.

Romantic Cartographies is the first collection to explore the reach and significance of cartographic practice in Romantic-period culture. Revealing the diverse ways in which the period sought to map and spatialise itself, the volume also considers the engagement of our own digital cultures with Romanticism's 'map-mindedness'. Original, exploratory essays engage with a wide range of cartographic projects, objects and experiences in Britain, and globally. Subjects range from Wordsworth, Clare and Walter Scott, to Romantic board games and geographical primers, to reveal the pervasiveness of the cartographic imagination in private and public spheres. Bringing together literary analysis, creative practice, geography, cartography, history, politics and contemporary technologies – just as the cartographic enterprise did in the Romantic period itself – Romantic Cartographies enriches our understanding of what it means to 'map' literature and culture.

A magnificently illustrated reconstruction of Wainwright's legendary May 1931 tour of the Lakes.