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The Lake District

The Basics

The Lake District may be one of England's best-loved and most visited regions, both among the natives and our overseas visitors, but it was not always so. Early travellers from outside the area (mostly London) found it a barren and inhospitable place, the kind of landscape in which you might easily be set upon by brigands, or where your horse might lose its footing on a mountain pass and send you to an early doom.

Lake District (silhouette white)
The transformation in how the Lakes were viewed began to come about towards the end of the 18th century, with the development of the Romantic sensibility and the appreciation of nature in all its untamed glory. It was the generation of Wordsworth and his cohorts who really brought home the beauty of the Lakes to the rest of England, and indeed Wordsworth himself never left the region.

There is a huge natural variety of landscapes within the Lake District, which is why it was designated one of England's first national parks in the 1950s. Today, the Lakes is at the forefront of environmental campaigns to preserve endangered species, as well as having an extraordinary concentration of some of the most highly regarded restaurants and hotels in the country.