Francis Place was one of the very first British-born artists to take up landscape and topography: the accurate recording of places or buildings. First trained as a lawyer, he spent much of his life in York, and made various sketching tours of the north of England.

He often travelled on foot, and worked outdoors on the spot. This drawing, in pen alone, was surely made that way. Such activity was so unusual at the time that he was arrested as a spy, suspected of involved in a Catholic plot.