Early pioneers

An intrepid early traveller through the Lakes was Celia Fiennes (1662-1741) who, in 1698, in the company of just a couple of servants, undertook a journey that took her through Kendal towards Patterdale. The idea of travelling for the sheer adventure of it was still relatively unheard of at this time, let alone the kind of thing an unmarried woman might get up to. Long before the Lakes had become a tourist destination, she had to rely on local hospitality and the odd family contact to get by on her journey.

Fiennes found the landscape both beautiful and intimidating. Picking her way uncertainly on horseback through the Kirkstone Pass, the highest road in the region (“this savage Pass” in the later verse of Wordsworth), she noted the “inaccessible high rocky barren hills, which hang over one’s head in some places and appear very terrible”.

Local life at this time is not the pastoral idyll that the Lakeland poets would later celebrate, but a hard, unforgiving, poverty-stricken existence of scant shelter and meagre sustenance:

“I came to villages of sad little huts made up of dry walls, only stones piled together… there seemed to be little or no tunnels for their chimneys and no mortar or plaster within or without. For the most part I took them at first sight for houses or barns to fodder cattle in… There is sad entertainment – that sort of clap bread [a type of flat oatmeal bread] and butter and cheese and a cup of beer all one can have. They are eight miles from a market town, and their miles are tedious to go both for illness of way and length.”

To Daniel Defoe, undergoing A Tour Thro’ The Whole Island Of Great Britain in the 1720s, the landscape of Westmorland proved “the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England”. The region was bounded by virtually “unpassable mountains”, and the straggling paths were the kind of route on which the unwary traveller may well be waylaid. There is a pungent sense of desolation in Defoe’s Lake District. Where later ages found sublime tranquillity, his Westmorland is a place where nobody can hear you scream.

Beautifying the Lakes

By the mid-18th century, ways of looking at the landscape had begun to change. The publication in 1757 of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful encapsulated a set of responses to nature that were akin to our reactions to great works of art. Nature could astonish us with its beauty, but it could also terrify us with its expanses of vast, barren emptiness, the overhanging of cliffs and the giddying depth of ravines.

These are all features to be found in the Lake District, but it was for the lakes themselves that the region became so revered. John Brown’s A Description Of The Lake At Keswick (1753) states the case: “The lake is a perfect mirror; and the landskip [landscape] in all its beauty, islands, fields, woods, rocks, and mountains, are seen inverted, and floating on its surface.” Not long after, the poet Thomas Gray’s Journal In The Lakes (1769), and the first of the practical travel guides, Thomas West’s A Guide To The Lakes (1778), contributed further to the popularising of the district, so that by the final decade of the 18th century, it had already become the chief tourist destination within the British Isles.

Although the beauties of the Lakes were now apppreciated, the area had lost none of its ruggedness and reputation for being hard-going. Thomas de Quincey essayed the Kirkstone journey too in 1807, finding it scarcely less arduous than Celia Fiennes had a century earlier: “In some parts it is almost frightfully steep; for the road being only the original mountain track of shepherds, gradually widened and improved from age to age… is carried over ground which no engineer, even in alpine countries, would have viewed as practicable.”

It was the Lakeland movement in literature, headed by poet William Wordsworth, and including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, that finally gave expression to the nation’s enduring love affair with the Lakes. Born in Cockermouth, dying in Ambleside, buried at Grasmere, Wordsworth was the prime mover in the celebration of the region’s beauty and its spiritual effect upon the sensitive observer. His Lakes poetry quickly came to occupy a particular place in the literary affections of the public, and he published A Guide To The Lakes in 1810. Going through five editions, its definitive final version appeared in 1835 as A Guide Through The District Of The Lakes In The North Of England.

Lakeland painters

The two great English landscape painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, JMW Turner and John Constable, both spent formative stays in the Lakes. Among Turner’s early work was a dramatic view of Lake Buttermere in foul weather, with a rainbow arching bravely across a turbulent sky.

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John Constable went on a seven-week tour of the Lake District in the autumn of 1806 at the age of 30. While there, he met Wordsworth near Ambleside, whom he greatly admired and who was then living at Dove Cottage. Constable drew and painted over 100 Lakeland scenes during this trip.

The short-lived Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) also specialised in watercolour images of the Lakes, in turn influencing Turner.

What makes it so special?

Overlapping the ancient counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, the Lake District was designated a National Park in 1951 – all 880 square miles of it. Its dramatic landscape was largely formed during the last ice age, between about 25,000 and 10,000 years ago. The movement of glaciers carved out the deep valleys and sculpted the high ridges that are characteristic of the region as we see it today. The retreat of the ice created the rivers, and also the deep hollows which, when they too filled with water, became the lakes. Here are the widest and deepest lakes, and the tallest peaks, in England.

As well as rivers and lakes, there are numerous smaller expanses of mountain water known as tarns, some of which are so small, they have never been named. All these freshwater environments are home to numerous aquatic species – such as the rare Arctic char and the vendace – varying according to the amount of nutrient in the water. Acres of ancient woodland, much of it natural, add to the variety of the scenery. The growth of a spectrum of mosses, ferns and lichens is encouraged by the area’s high rainfall. Among the human additions to the landscape are the miles of hedgerows and dry-stone walls, and the stone farm buildings.

Local wildlife

This is one of the last areas in England where the native red squirrel is still found in the wild, as is the red deer. Ospreys, golden eagles and black guillemots, the only ones in the country, are known to be nesting here, while the peregrine falcon and the barn owl also call it home. The salt marshes of Cumbria are one of the last remaining habitats in England for depleted populations of the natterjack toad.

Speaking towards the end of his life, Wordsworth wrote of the British estimation of the Lake District, which he had himself done so much to nurture, “they deem the district a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.”