Little Switzerland (landscape)
The original generic term was applied to dozens of locations in Europe, the bulk of them German-speaking, as well as to other parts of the world, to direct attention to rock outcrops that stand out, usually amid steep forest.
The many English places praised in 19th-century promotional literature as "little Switzerland" include Church Stretton, Whitfield and the coastal area around the North Devon twin towns of Lynton and Lynmouth.
The following passage, describing Wales, appears in an 1831 English-language edition of Malte-Brun's Universal Geography, which had originally been written in French in 1803–07: The great number of mountains which diversify its surface have gained it the name of Little Switzerland.
It will be readily understood that it is not in the loftiness of their summits this resemblance can be traced with the country of the Alps, but in their steep, rough and perpendicular sides, the depth of their narrow valleys, the small but limpid lakes which occur at every step, the great number of rivers and streams which are now precipitated in cascades, and now roll their waters slowly through the meadows, the damp fogs which rise from the surface of these waters and often hang about the summits of the highest mountains, and the snow which frequently continues upon the heights till the end of spring: all of which give to these mountains, notwithstanding their inconsiderable height ... an appearance resembling those lordly eminences mounting up to the clouds and bearing on their heads eternal snows.
[3]Describing the Atlantic island of St Helena in A New Voyage Round the World (1823–26), Otto von Kotzebue and Johann Friedrich Eschscholtz were translated into English as writing: The environs of Sandy Bay would be a perfect little Switzerland, but that the glaciers are wanting to complete the resemblance.
[4]In the United States, the raw White Mountains of New Hampshire, which were soon to be one of the definitive subjects of American Romantic painting, were termed a little Switzerland by travel writer Henry Tudor as early as 1832.
