The Lake District is 900 square miles of mountain, lake and fell in the north-west corner of England, and it is the most visited national park in Britain. It contains every English peak above 3,000 feet and the country’s deepest and longest lakes.
The pedantic bit
There is only one lake. Every other body of water is a mere, a water or a tarn — Windermere, Grasmere, Derwentwater, Ullswater, Coniston Water. Only Bassenthwaite Lake carries the word, which makes it the only lake in the Lake District. Locals enjoy pointing this out.
The landscape
Scafell Pike at 978m is England’s highest mountain; Wastwater is its deepest lake; Windermere its longest. The hills are called fells, and they are not high by international standards but are steep, exposed and genuinely serious in bad weather — mountain rescue teams here are among the busiest in Britain.
Almost none of it is wilderness. The open fells, dry stone walls and grazed valleys are the product of a thousand years of sheep farming, which is precisely why UNESCO listed it in 2017 — as a cultural landscape rather than a natural one.
The poets
William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth and lived most of his life at Grasmere and Rydal Mount. He and Coleridge effectively invented English Romantic poetry here, and Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes did more to create British tourism than any other book of its century.
He was also, unexpectedly, an early conservationist — he opposed the railway reaching the heart of the lakes, arguing that the landscape was “a sort of national property in which every man has a right”. The National Trust was founded partly on that idea, and Wordsworth’s home at Dove Cottage is open to visitors.
Beatrix Potter
The author of Peter Rabbit used the proceeds to buy Lake District farmland, becoming a serious Herdwick sheep breeder and a significant landowner. On her death in 1943 she left over 4,000 acres and fifteen farms to the National Trust, which is a large part of why the central fells were never developed.
Walking it
Alfred Wainwright’s seven hand-drawn Pictorial Guides, written between 1955 and 1966, catalogue 214 fells. Completing all of them — “bagging the Wainwrights” — is a lifetime project for thousands of British walkers, and the books are still in print exactly as he drew them.
Practical notes
It rains. Seathwaite is the wettest inhabited place in England at over 3,500mm a year, and the weather changes fast enough to be dangerous on the tops. Go midweek or out of season if you can; the honeypots — Windermere, Ambleside, Keswick — are extremely busy in August, while the western valleys of Wasdale and Ennerdale stay quiet all year.