Keswick sits contentedly between Derwent Water and the brooding bulk of Skiddaw, England's fourth highest mountain, and has welcomed visitors since the railway arrived in 1864 and departed again in 1972, its old line now a footpath beside the River Greta.

The town's most improbable attraction is its Pencil Museum, born of graphite deposits discovered nearby in Borrowdale so pure they were once worth more than gold, so prized that smugglers gave us the phrase "black market" trying to sneak the stuff away. Keswick opened Britain's first pencil factory in 1832 and still displays a pencil measuring almost twenty six feet.

Before all that, Coleridge and Southey lived at Greta Hall, while Crosthwaite's vicar, Hardwicke Rawnsley, befriended a young Beatrix Potter and helped found the National Trust in 1895.

VoiceMap's driving tours use Keswick as their gateway, tracing how graphite, poets and one determined vicar shaped the northern Lake District.