The Alps have loomed large in the artistic imagination since the Romantic poets explored them in search of ‘the sublime’. Historian Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough talks to writer Abbie Garrington and climber Dan Richards. His book Climbing Days tells the life of his Great-Great Aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a pioneering woman climber, and reflects on the appeal of the mountains and how the landscape can be a force for creativity, in music and literature. Abbie Garrington, from Durham University, has a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a literary history of mountaineering.

Producer: Zahid Warley