In 1818, when Keats was 22-years old, he and his friend Charles Brown embarked on a walking tour through northern England, Ireland and Scotland, starting in Lancaster and finishing 44 days and over 600 miles later, in Scotland, just north of Inverness. The book recreates Keats' tour and consists of three sections. In an informative introduction, Carol Kyros Walker discusses Keats' circumstances and places his trip in the context of the social and political events of the time. At the centre of the book are over 150 photographs, many in colour, taken by Walker as she retraced Keats' footsteps and tried to simulate the circumstances under which Keats would have viewed the scenes, photographing on the date and time of day of his arrival. Finally there are the letters and poems that Keats wrote during the tour and the journal that Brown later published, all annotated to relate them both to Keats' other works, and to the contemporary circumstances of the journey. The tour, which Keats envisaged as a prologue to his future writing, had dire consequences for his health and probably hastened his death three years later.
Yet it inspired a sequence of lively letters and poems that reveal a high-spirited, curious, reflective, occasionally bawdy and immensely gifted young writer.