Who Said Romance Was Dead?

This article uses recent work in the central Lake District to explore current approaches to prehistoric landscapes in Britain. It argues that those approaches owe much to ways of seeing, which have their roots in the Romantic tradition, in particular, a tendency to privilege vision over the other senses. The more recent history of the area is drawn upon to argue for approaches which deal more directly with the physical engagement with landscape at varied scales. Such an approach has implications for the ways that the area has been, and remains, caught up in discourses of identity.