The Lake District’s valleys and mountains formed a natural amphitheatre that witnessed what Martin Kaltenecker has called “the materialisation of a listening discourse,” whereby the venue for a sonic experience indicates how the listener should respond to the sounds heard there. I argue that the soundscape ecology portrayed in Romantic-era tourist guides, travel narratives and poetry about the Lake District developed a connection between the region’s natural features and its human visitors.

This article is interested in that relationship between the Lake District’s landscape and its soundscape. Acoustic experiences were as subject to contemporary fashion as visual ones, and the late-eighteenth century catalyzed the emergence of hearing as what Sophia Rosenfeld calls “a cultural effect as much as a physiological one.” 3 Wordsworth’s considerations of the relationship between noise, sound and silence in the Lake District advanced a debate on the role of sound in the artistic imagination, and in the environment, that was at the foreground of aesthetic thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

” 2 One era’s noise might become another’s sound, or even another’s silence. These were personal judgments as Peter Coates pithily puts it, “ust as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, noise frequently resides in the ear of the listener. He concluded with a damning suggestion of where minds disposed to noise could go: “o to a pantomime, a farce, or a puppet-show, if you want noisy pleasure.” 1 “The wide-spread waters of these regions,” he declared, “are in their nature peaceful so are the steep mountains and the rocky glens nor can they be profitably enjoyed but by a mind disposed to peace.” A person who could enjoy quiet and solitude “profitably” by discovering meanings in them was the only kind of person Wordsworth considered qualified to appreciate his native region.

One of Wordsworth’s central arguments was that the railway-and the countless numbers of visitors it would bring-would disrupt a much-loved characteristic of the Lake District: its quietness. I n december 1844, william wordsworth wrote a pair of now infamous letters to the editor of the Morning Post, in which he decried the proposal to extend the railway to Windermere.

Echoes on the lake