Lake District poets

The poet Thomas Gray visited on his Lakeland tour in 1769. He walked in the park, and his account gives a fascinating glimpse of the very beginning of the industrial revolution, when its activities were seen as demonic but sublime, like an illustration to Paradise Lost:
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This seat of the Stricklands, an old catholic family, is an ancient hallhouse, with a very large tower embattled ... I soon came to the river; it works its way in a narrow and deep rocky channel over hung with trees. The calmness and brightness of the evening, the roar of the waters, and the thumping of huge hammers at an iron forge not far distant, made it a singular walk: but as to the falls (for there are two) they are not four feet high. I went on, down to the forge, and saw the demons at work by the light of their own fires: the iron is brought in pigs to Milthrop [Milnthorpe] by sea from Scotland, &co. and is here beat into bars and plates.

To reach the walk, take the lane E from the Hall entrance and go under the road. Follow the lane to its end, and then turn L (N) until you reach a footbridge. You can follow the river for about 2m. There are no ironworks now, and perhaps Gray means that he went down to Milnthorpe, then a busy little port (the Kent estuary has since silted up).

Continue 4m N to Kendal (several well hidden car parks, and a truly fiendish oneway system), a pleasant town of silver-gray limestone clustered in the Kent valley. Drayton's Polyolbion (1619) gives us an eloquent introduction:

Where Can first creeping forth, her feet hath scarcely found, But gives that Dale her name, where Kendal towne doth stand, For making of our Cloth scarce match'd in all the land. 'Can', of course, is the River Kent, which flows attractively through the town centre. Kendal was famous as a cloth town from the fourteenth century onwards: hence Falstaff's tall story of the 'three misbegotten knaves in Kendal green' who gave him so much trouble in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One.

Most early visitors mention the cloth industry. Celia Fiennes gives a characteristically breathless sketch in 1698: Kendal is a town built all of stone, one very broad streete which is the Market Crosse, it’s a goode trading town mostly famed for the cottons; Kendal Cotton is used for blankets and the Scots use them for their plodds [plaids] and there is much made here and also linsi woolseys and a great deal of leather tann's here and all sorts of commodities twice a week is the market furnished with all sorts of things.

She visited the King's Arms (now gone), where One Mrs Rowlandson she does pott up the charr fish the best of any in the country, I was curious to have some and so bespoke some of her. The food (including the potted charr) was still good at the King's Arms in 1768 when Arthur Young, busy touring the north of England to report on its economic potential and productivity, recorded:

A good house, very civil, and remarkably cheap. A brace of woodcocks, veal cutlets, and cheese, Is. a head, dinner. A boiled fowl and sauce, a roast partidge, potted charr, cold ham, tarts, and three or four sorts of foreign sweetmeats, 8d. a head; three people supped. Another supper; cold ham, tarts, potted charr, anchovies, butter and cheese, 6d. a head. Tea or coffee 6d. a head. Other things proportionably cheap.