How were Cumbria’s uplands regarded before the ‘discovery’ of the Lakes? Chris Donaldson and Ian Gregory addressed this question in their joint lecture at the 2018 Kendal Mountain Festival. Speaking to a sell-out audience, Chris and Ian discussed continuities and changes in the experiences of people passing through the region over the past 400 years. Among other matters, they touched on the longstanding convention of the hiker’s pub lunch, revealing that travellers were enjoying local ale and game pie as far back as 1634. In the main, though, Chris and Ian’s lecture reflected on the way responses to the Lakes from the 1700s onwards have partitioned off the Lake District from the rest of the region. Combining both readings of print and manuscript sources with quantitative digital visualisations, Ian and Chris considered the causes underpinning this partitioning and they explored its long-term implications.