This drawing is a typical product of Constable's last sketching tour to the Lake District for seven weeks in September and October 1806. He was encourage and probably partly financed by his uncle David Watts who had lived at Storrs Hall on he shores of Lake Windermere. Dated drawings show that he was at Kendal on 1 September. He spent the first few days at Ambleside and then moved to Brathay Hall at the head of Windermere where he stayed with the amateur artist John Harden and his wife. By the 19 September he had set off for Borrowdale with George, the son of the portraitist Daniel Gardner. On 15 October he returned to Brathay Hall and his last recorded drawing of the tour, a depiction of Langdale, was dated 19 October.

Constable did over seventy drawings on this tour. They are characterised, as in this example, by a sense of three-dimensional values, combined with flowing line in the dpecition of trees; the forms are largely modelled by diagonal cross-hatching. Constable used this series of drawings for a number of oil paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution from 1807 until 1809. (For this group of drawings see L. Parris I. Fleming-Williams and C. Shields, Constable: Paintings, Watercolours & Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, 1976, pp. 59, 63-7 under nos. 69-77; I. Fleming-Williams, Constable: Landscape Watercolour Drawings, 1976, pp. 32-4; L. Parris and Il Fleming-Williams, Constable, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, 1991, pp. 21, 398-404 under nos. 232-4; and I. Fleming-Williams Constable and his Drawings, 1990, pp. 76-95)