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IntroductionThis is a book about the English Lake District, and is for anybody who is even the tiniest bit interested in this

beautiful and bewitching part of the world.

The Story of the English Lake District takes a long look at Lakeland’s varied, and often dramatic, landscape – how it was created from sand, silt and mud laid down in ancient seas, and from lava and ash thrown out of huge volcanoes. How the almost naked rock after the Ice Ages was eventually clothed with trees and how, over the last few thousand years mankind has been shaping the land by using it for crops, pasture and forest and by putting up walls and buildings. We will also see how rocks and minerals have been won from quarries and mines, and how the abundant supplies of water have been used to provide power for mills and factories and have been coveted by distant urban populations. We will look at the human history of the area, from the hunter-gatherer-fishermen of the stone age to the relatively wealthy and leisured classes of the high-tech post-World War Two era, discovering on the way stone circles, Bronze Age settlements, Roman forts, Anglo-Saxon and Viking crosses, Norman castles and monasteries and much more.

It is not just the what, the when, the how and the why that we’re interested in though. What transforms any location from an empty, almost sterile landscape into a living entity is people, so we’ll be spending some time looking at the who as well. There are stories of the great and the good – and the not so very good at all – and snippets of information about the not-so-well-known-but-every-bit-as-interesting: people such as the men who staged a mock battle on Derwent Water using real cannon balls, the aristocrat who almost rode a one-eyed horse to victory in the Grand National and the keen botanist who kept crocodiles in his garden.

There are bits about wildlife, rock-climbing, village life and traditions, country sports, rugby league, place-names, farm buildings, conservation, rights of way, cast-iron houses, railways, breweries, damsons and, of course, world champion face-pullers and liars (although I might have made that last bit up).

In short, the book covers a multitude of topics, most of them not in any enormous depth. The aim is that there will be enough information to allow the reader to understand, but not so much that he or she feels bombarded with facts, and my hope is that everybody, whatever their level of knowledge about the Lake District, will find plenty of stuff in here to keep them interested and entertained. When it all comes down to it, that’s what this book is: it’s a book of stuff.

Having acquired mountains of that precious stuff over the couple of years it has taken to get the material for this book together, I did not want to just throw it all at the page in a totally random fashion, so I thought I would accompany the reader on a journey through the Lakes and we could talk about the things we see and the issues that might crop up as a result of that conversation. And, because seeing things at walking speed gives you time to stop and have a proper look at them, I thought the journey should be a walk – or, rather, a series of shorter walks linked together to make a great big long one. This does not mean that you have to do the walk, or any part of it, to enjoy the book. No, the walk is just a device to give some sort of structure to this take on the Lake District story and, if you want to put a physical substance to some of the things we talk about, the walk is a suggested way for you to do that. And the big walk we’ve ended up with is 600 miles long and divided into 60 separate days, each day being given its own chapter.

The Lake District – or the Lakes, or Lakeland – has no official boundary. The Lake District was designated a National Park in 1951 and a boundary had to be agreed for that purpose, but I imagine that, if you had asked 100 people in 1950 where the boundary should be drawn, you would have had 100 different replies. The area covered by this book is based loosely on the National Park but extends beyond it to include the market towns which have played – and continue to play – such an important part in the lives of the people who live or work inside the National Park: towns such as Whitehaven, Cockermouth, Penrith and Kendal. Also included are three of the mining towns of south and west Cumberland: Millom, Egremont and Cleator Moor. Millom and Egremont were both towns of some importance 750 or so years ago when the political map of what is now the Lake District was beginning to take shape, while Cleator Moor is on the line of the route between Whitehaven and Ennerdale and would have been difficult to miss: it is a friendly and fascinating place anyway. All three towns played a major part in the industrial history of Cumbria, all three have a few interesting stories to tell and, in all three, the fells are so close that they seem to be growing straight out of the back gardens.

THE STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT2

In the same neck of the woods is Sellafield. Built as the world’s first full-scale nuclear power station and later used to reprocess nuclear waste, the site at Sellafield, although outside the National Park, is impossible to ignore. Not only is it visible from much of the western Lake District, it is the largest single-site employer in Cumbria with somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand people earning a living there. Its impact on the local community is considerable, and so Sellafield is included too, as is the nearby coastal village of Seascale, which once had ambitions to be the Eastbourne of the north and used to be known as ‘the brainiest village in England’. Just outside the National Park on the opposite side of the Lakes is the village of Shap, and that is included for all sorts of reasons – its part in British transport history (which unfortunately led to the destruction of one of Cumbria’s largest stone circles), its top-secret and vital industrial plant and the fact that it has England’s highest heated outdoor swimming pool. Situated as it is on an otherwise inhospitable and windswept upland, Shap’s pubs, cafes and shops are very welcome, so I’d have been crazy to leave it out. And, finally, Grange and Cartmel are included. It is a matter of some surprise that they were not included in the National Park in the first place but there we are.

Before we set off on our journey, just a couple of things. There is a little more on the walking route on the next page but, first, just so that we have an idea about what we’re dealing with, here is a very brief snap-shot of the Lake District and its history. The Lake District National Park covers an area of 885 square miles (2,292 square kilometres). At the 2011 census its population was just under 41,000 with 15% of its houses being holiday-lets or second homes. For centuries the main occupations were associated with sheep farming and forestry but tourism is now both the biggest employer (over 15,000 full-time equivalent jobs) and main source of income. In 2013 the Lake District had more than 15 million visitors who spent £1,051 million.

The Lake District consists very roughly of a mountainous centre with the sea to south and west, the Solway Plain to the north and the Eden Valley and Pennines to the east. The central core is made up of three main types of rock – slates in the north and west (the Skiddaws), volcanic rocks in the centre (the Borrowdales) and more slates in the south and east (the Windermeres). There are also some areas of granite and, forming rings around that central core are deposits of limestone, sandstone and other bits and pieces. The oldest rocks (the Skiddaws) go back about 500 million years, and were soon (in geological terms) followed by the other rocks in the mountain core. These were all uplifted into a sort of tilted dome during the Caledonian mountain-building period. The limestones and sandstones etc are more recent. For almost 2 million years, and ending only about 11,000 years ago, the whole of the Lake District was in the grip of successive ice ages, sometimes being submerged by ice, but with warmer periods between each ice age. The ice has had a profound effect on the landscape as we will soon see. After the ice retreated, soils formed and plants began to colonise the area, with the maximum tree cover (oak, hazel, elm and pine) being reached about 9,000 years ago.

Apart from some very sparse evidence of temporary occupation of caves on Morecambe Bay, the first settlers arrived on the Cumbrian coast around 8,000 years ago. About 4,500 years ago, late Neolithic (or early Bronze Age) people lived in permanent settlements at places such as Barnscar, built the stone circles (e.g. Castlerigg) and operated a fairly sophisticated axe-making industry in Great Langdale. The Romans were here for about 300 years from AD78 but their presence in the Lake District was almost entirely a military one, so they left forts and roads but had no major impact on civilian life. During the 600 years leading up to the Norman Conquest, there were colonizations by Anglo-Saxons and then Norsemen (Vikings), with farming and tree clearance being pushed ever further into the mountain country. After the Norman Conquest, the political map of the area began to take shape and towns started to develop, the most important ones being dominated by castles. About half a dozen monasteries were founded and they, along with secular land-owners, started to develop large-scale sheep farming.

As trade began to increase a road network developed, at first suitable only for pack horses. Mining and quarrying became increasingly important and tourism was given a boost when the railway came to the Lake District in the middle of the 19th century. The late 19th century and much of the 20th saw the construction of reservoirs (the largest ones being for the city of Manchester) and the planting of conifer forests (to tackle the timber shortage after the First World War). The second half of the 20th century brought the creation of the National Park, new industries, such as nuclear power, and various road schemes, while the Lake District is now dealing with traffic problems, a World Heritage bid, a shortage of affordable housing leading to young people moving away from the villages they grew up in and a consequent ageing rural population, the effects of climate change and most of the other issues affecting 21st century Britain.

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So far as the walking route itself is concerned, the main idea was to visit as much of the Lake District as possible, with a mix of very familiar places and some not so well known. The route has been designed such that every one of the 60 days is do-able by the famously non-existent average walker and ends where there is accommodation or a decent public transport service. And each day’s walk had, as far as possible, to be on good footpaths. The distances and height gain for the day’s walk are given at the start of each chapter and just about all the walks can be lengthened or shortened to suit the individual. This is the Lake District, remember, so much of the ground is rough and can be wet. The weather can be fickle and the assumption is that none of the walks will be done during the winter months when daylight hours are short and bad weather is more likely. Brief route notes are included in this book so that any walker with the appropriate 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map should be able to transfer the route onto the map. But please be aware that the notes omit the sort of detail you would normally find in a walking guide. Anything more than basic directions are given only where the way is not clear from the map, usually where the route is not on rights of way, or crosses trackless ground or is in forest. This is NOT a guide book, and anybody setting off on any of the walks should bear that in mind and be adequately kitted out with map and compass and the ability to use them. (It is hoped that detailed route notes will become available at a later date: have a look at www.mywalkingguide.com or contact the author at hike@mywalkingguide.com for information.)

Because the route is a circular one, it can be started anywhere. The book starts at Windermere – because it is the easiest place to get to for most visitors to the Lakes, it can be reached by public transport (train and bus), there is lots of accommodation and many of the themes that recur throughout the book are present here so can be looked at early on in the book. Similarly, the book can be read from cover to cover or it can be dipped into wherever you like. If you’re staying in Buttermere, say, you can turn to Days 31 and 32 and have a look at the walks and the photos and have a read about items of local interest such as the ‘Maid of Buttermere’, the tunnel on the lakeshore path and whether a battle really did take place in Rannerdale.

The route notes are in red italics, the yellow boxes contain items of particular significance or are about particularly well-known figures, and the side panels are mainly for additional snippets of information that you could skip without the flow of the text being affected (although sometimes other stuff has got in there as well). Because of the way the book is set out, certain topics recur and, although there is some repetition, reference is made to the day on which the main entry is located: this has usually been done by writing the day number in brackets. And I make no distinction between the terms the Lake District, the Lakes and Lakeland: they are all used here and mean the same thing.

Finally, I would like to make special mention of four books in particular which have been invaluable in the writing of this book. They are Diana Whaley’s A Dictionary of Lake District Place-Names, Peter Wilson’s Lake District Mountain Landforms and two classic Lake District ‘text books’, both entitled simply The Lake District, one by Pearsall and Pennington, and the other by Millward and Robinson. Acknowledgement for material I have taken from those books is usually given in the text just by giving the names of the authors. Other frequently read and much loved books that I can heartily recommend to the general reader are Greater Lakeland and Portrait of the Lakes, both by Norman Nicholson, and Walt Unsworth’s An Illustrated Companion into Lakeland. In the absence of any other indication, any reference to Walt Unsworth or Norman Nicholson means the information came from one of those books.

My hope is that, whether you are a Lake District expert or a novice, you will find something here that you didn’t know: something that will arouse your curiosity enough to make you want to go and have a look or want to read more about it. If that happens, we’ll all be happy. And if not...well, you can always look at the pictures. Get stuck in and enjoy it!

NB Two or three abbreviations have sneaked under the radar to find their way into the text. If you spot them, NT is the National Trust, LDNPA is the Lake District National Park Authority and MOD is the Ministry of Defence.