 Hoskins uses the first few pages of this chapter as an introduction, beginning with praise for William Wordsworth's A Guide through the District of the Lakes (1810), and from which he quotes a passage in which the reader is asked to envisage "an image of the tides visiting and revisiting the friths, the main sea dashing against the bolder shore". Hoskins writes that on a desolate moor one can feel oneself imaginatively back in time to the Bronze Age, but that there are now few such unaltered places left. He argues that the landscape historian "needs to be a botanist, a physical geographer, and a naturalist, as well as an historian" to understand a scene in full:
