Westmorland was a historic county of north-west England, bounded by Cumberland to the north and north-west, the bishopric of Durham and Yorkshire to the north-east and east, Yorkshire again to the south-east, and Lancashire to the south and south-west. Eighteenth-century surveys measured it at about fifty miles long and forty broad, some 510,000 acres divided into the two ancient baronies of Kendal, mountainous and rugged, and Westmorland proper, a broader open country, containing altogether just eight market towns and twenty-six parishes. Uniquely, the office of hereditary sheriff of the county was held by the Earl of Thanet, a survival of feudal privilege unusual even among England's more conservative northern shires.
The county's mountainous ground was largely barren, but its valleys, watered by the Eden, Lune and Kent, produced good corn and grass, and antiquarian writers noted persistent rumours of gold and copper in the western hills, though the ore generally lay too deep to work profitably. Westmorland's real wealth, however, lay increasingly in its scenery: the lakes and falls around Ambleside, Windermere — then still written Winander Mere — and Grasmere were already, by the 1770s, drawing genteel travellers in search of picturesque views, a full generation before the Lake Poets settled in the district and gave the region its lasting literary fame.
Appleby Castle on the Eden, the county town's dominant landmark, and the more remote fortresses of Brough, Brougham and Pendragon, guarding the old road across Stainmore into Yorkshire, recalled centuries spent defending England's northern border. Kendal, taking its name from the River Kent on which it stands, was the county's principal town and a long-established centre of the wool trade. Westmorland retained its separate identity until 1974, when it was merged with Cumberland and parts of Lancashire to form the modern county of Cumbria.