This paper reports on interdisciplinary research into the automated geographical analysis of historical text corpora. It provides an introduction to this research, which is being completed by two interrelated projects: the European Research Council-funded Spatial Humanities project and the Leverhulme Trust-funded Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities project. In addition to contextualising the work of these projects, the paper introduces a case study that applies collocation analysis, automated geo-parsing, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The focus of this study is a 1.5 million-word corpus of writing about the English Lake District. This corpus comprises 80 works written between the years 1622 and 1900. In investigating this corpus, we demonstrate how a hybrid geographical and corpus-based methodology can be used to study the application of specific aesthetic terminology in historical writing about the Lakeland region.