OLD PHOTOGRAPHS of Lynmouth have been revealed for the first time, in a new book about a Victorian photographer.

Bristol-born John Wheeley Gough Gutch was experimenting with photography as early as 1841 and he discovered Lynmouth on his travels around the country.

His work, influenced by the poets and painters of the period, lay undiscovered and unpublished for more than 150 years — until now.

A disabled ex-surgeon, Gutch walked, rode and boated his way around Victorian England with his enormous camera. Among the albums he carefully compiled were these panoramas of Lynmouth's pier and foreland, boats in the harbour, the Rising Sun on the harbourside, the East Lyn, and more.

The new book, In Search of the Picturesque, reveals more than 100 unpublished photographs and offers an insight into the world of the pioneering photographer.

It also includes a commentary by Ian Sumner and extracts from Gutch's articles, first published in Thomas Sutton's Photographic Notes.

Partially paralysed and using a Scott-Archer wet-plate camera that doubled as a darkroom, Gutch explored the towns and villages of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and the Lake District.

He travelled by railway, canal and along miles of muddy rural tracks by horse-drawn omnibus, stopping to photograph the scenes and people along the way.

Pestered by curious children, and often placing himself in the picture, Gutch captured the essence of Victorian England, including the industrial landscape that his contemporaries chose to ignore.

Unusually, he made portraits of working people in their native setting: pilchard fishermen, tin miners and stonemasons, and made unique and beautiful panoramic landscapes.

Ian Sumner explained that a friend, who is a photographic dealer in London, picked up five albums at an antiques auction in the Midlands.

"But he didn't know who they were by, but when he showed them to me I knew immediately from the initials on the albums."

He said that while Gutch's contemporaries carried portable dark rooms, in the form of a tent, Gutch's infirmity meant he found it easier to process the glass plates in the camera itself.

"It was a unique thing about 2ft square. He also took panoramas, which these days are quite easy to blend together using Photoshop, but each wet plate took several minutes of exposure and then took quite a lot of work to put together."

He said the photographer took about 36 plates in Lynmouth, in 1856, when it was hugely popular with photographers and artists: "In his notes he said he was practically tripping over them. But he didn't find much to interest him in Lynton and only took a couple there."

Mr Sumner said that while later photographs are more common, very few still existed from the 1850s

In Search of the Picturesque is published this month by Westcliffe Books (an imprint of Redcliffe Press)

ISBN 978-1-906593-27-8