THE LAKE DISTRICT, ENGLAND

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The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes and its mountains (or fells) but also for its associations with the early 19th century poetry and writings of William Wordsworth and the other Lake Poets.

The majority of the area was designated as the Lake District National Park in 1951. It is the largest of the thirteen National Parks in England and Wales, and the second largest in the UK (after the Cairngorms). It lies entirely within the modern county of Cumbria, shared historically by the counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire. All the land in England higher than three thousand feet above sea level lies within the National Park, including Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England. It also contains the deepest and longest lakes in England.

The precise extent of the Lake District was not defined traditionally but is approximated by the boundary of the National Park, the total area of which is about 885 square miles (2,292 km2). The Park extends just over 32 miles (52 km) from east to west and nearly 40 miles (64 km) from north to south, with areas such as the Lake District Peninsulas to the south lying outside the National Park.

The Lake District is one of the most highly populated national parks. There are however only a handful of major settlements within this mountainous area - the towns of Keswick, Windermere, Ambleside and Bowness-on-Windermere being the largest four. Significant towns immediately outwith the boundary of the national park include Kendal, Cockermouth, Penrith and Grange-over-Sands; each of these have important economic links with the area. Villages such as Coniston, Threlkeld, Pooley Bridge, Broughton-in-Furness, Grasmere, Newby Bridge, Staveley, Lindale, Gosforth and Hawkshead act as more local centres. The economies of almost all are intimately linked with tourism. Beyond these are a scatter of hamlets and innumerable isolated farmsteads, some of which are still tied to agriculture, others now function as part of the tourist economy.

The principal radial valleys are (clockwise from the south) those of Dunnerdale, Eskdale, Wasdale, Ennerdale, Lorton Vale and the Buttermere valley, the Derwent valley and Borrowdale, the valleys containing Ullswater and Haweswater, Longsleddale, the Kentmere valley and those radiating from the head of Windermere including Great Langdale. The valleys serve to break the mountains up into separate blocks which have been described by various authors in different ways. The most frequently encountered approach is that made popular by Alfred Wainwright who published seven separate area guides to the Lakeland Fells.

Only one of the lakes in the Lake District is called by that name, Bassenthwaite Lake. All the others such as Windermere, Coniston Water, Ullswater and Buttermere are meres, tarns and waters, with mere being the least common and water being the most common.