'At bottom the Lake District is a piece of rock. It is the rock which makes the land and the land which makes the people' Norman Nicholson, Portrait of the Lakes (1963).
In May 2022 Dr Penny Bradshaw, theme lead for Cultural Landscapes, led a 2-hour workshop at Brantwood exploring the importance of geology within the cultural imagination of Cumbrian writers, particularly in relation to questions of identity. Moving from Wordsworth to Ruskin, and then onto Nicholson and more recent writers, the session reflected on the ways in which Cumbrian writers explore the idea that the identity of the Cumbrian people is fundamentally shaped by the geological underpinnings of the region they inhabit.
This workshop was part of GeoWeek2022 activities. It was one of a series of events running throughout Cumbria which celebrated Cumbria's 500-million-year-old geological history, by exploring how geology has influenced us and our heritage.