From the late Bronze Age, around 1200 BC, until the Roman conquest in AD 43, ancient Britons went to sacred lakes to make offerings to their gods and ancestors. They threw precious metalwork, such as swords, shields and cauldrons, into the water. The offerings were often deliberately broken to symbolically "kill" them.

The best-known site of lake offerings is Flag Fen, near Peterborough. Here Bronze Age people constructed a walkway over the water, driving oak timbers into the muddy bed. For 1,000 years, the walkway was used to throw daggers, swords, spears and jewellery into the lake water.

Lady of the Lake

The custom of throwing swords into lakes recalls the story of King Arthur. The Arthurian legends feature a mysterious ''Lady of the Lake'' who gives Arthur his sword, Excalibur. After his last battle, the dying Arthur asks his loyal friend, Bedivere, to throw Excalibur into a nearby lake and report on what he sees. Bedivere cannot bear throwing away such a valuable weapon, and twice pretends that he has obeyed Arthur. Yet the King knows that Bedivere is lying when he reports that the sword simply vanished underwater. When Bedivere finally throws the sword into the lake, the Lady of the Lake's arm emerges to catch it. After brandishing the sword three times, her arm sinks beneath the water.

The Lady of the Lake plays another role in the Arthurian cycle, kidnapping the child Lancelot, whom she takes to her underwater home, where she trains him to be a knight. This is why the great hero is sometimes known as Lancelot du Lac (of the lake).

Such legends are surely rooted in the ancient belief that a lake was a gateway to the spirit world.

The Water Hag

The earliest English epic poem, Beowulf, features two monsters, Grendel and his mother, who live at the bottom of a lake. The lake itself is a terrifying place, where fire glows beneath the water at night, and frothing waves rise blackly to the sky. Beowulf, who has killed Grendel, must then dive into the lake to find and kill his vengeful mother. The tumbling water swallows the hero up, and it takes him a whole day's swimming before he can see the lake bottom. Then Grendel's mother, an enormous "water-hag", seizes him with her hooked talons and drags him to her underwater den. Here they have a ferocious battle, which ends when Beowulf stabs her with a magic sword.

Lakeland lore

The Lake District itself is rich in folklore. There are many local links with King Arthur, such as the henge monument near Penrith called King Arthur's Round Table. The historical Arthur would have been a Romano-Celt, leading resistance to the invading Anglo-Saxons. Since Cumbria was one of the great strongholds of Celtic resistance, this may well have been his territory.

Lakeland has many stories of ghosts, phantom dogs and fairies. In the village of Beetham, there is a set of "fairy steps" carved into the rocks. If you can descend them without touching the sides, it is said that the fairies will grant you a wish. The same area is said to be haunted by two demon dogs. One is the "Cappel" whose fiery eyes strike terror into anyone who sees him - usually at dusk. The second is a Headless Hound, who prophecies death for anybody it follows.

The church at Renwick was supposedly haunted by a giant phantom bat, which flitted about the village on certain evenings. Villagers claimed they could sense its presence by a sudden chill in the air.

On stormy nights, the ferrymen at Ferry Nab on Lake Windermere used to hear calls from the heights at Claife for a boat to come across the water. They were always too scared to answer the "Caller of Claife", until one night, a young brave ferryman decided to row across. He returned so terrified at what he had seen that he could not speak, and he died the next day.

The Tizzie-Wizzie of Windermere

Lake Windermere has its own mythical beast, called a "Tizzie Wizzie". In the early 1900s, a boatman at Bowness used to entertain tourists with stories of his encounters with this strange shy creature. He claimed that it had the body of a hedgehog, the tail of a squirrel and a pair of bee-like wings. Although many people thought he was making the whole story up, sightings of Tizzie-Wizzies are still reported today.

Find out more about the Tizzie-Wizzie here