Keswick Museum and Art Gallery

Keswick Museum and Art Gallery stands in Fitz Park, a green space on the edge of Keswick in the English Lake District. The building was raised in 1897 as a memorial to the Hewetson brothers, local benefactors, and enlarged in 1906 when Cannon Hardwicke Rawnsley opened the art gallery. A full refurbishment finished in 2014 with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The museum holds about twenty thousand objects, though only five to ten per cent are shown at any time. Among its treasures is Joseph Flintoft’s 1837 model of the Lake District, a three-dimensional map measuring twelve feet by nine feet. Visitors can also see the Musical Stones of Skiddaw, lithophones carved from local hornfels that ring for unusually long periods. A 700-year-old mummified cat and roughly eighty pieces from the Keswick School of Industrial Art form part of the display. The collection includes letters, maps and manuscripts linked to the Lake poets. Works by William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey, who lived in Keswick from 1803 to 1843, are especially well represented. Changing exhibitions once featured climbers such as Chris Bonington and Siegfried Herford, organised by the Mountain Heritage Trust. The park itself offers views of the surrounding fells and a quiet place to walk after viewing the exhibits.