The Lake District: A Landscape in Amber

By Jim Hargan | British Heritage  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

It’s a view you just stumble across.

A stone farmhouse, bright with whitewash, sits across a cheerful little stream, its front door facing a luxuriantly green meadow where sheep look like tiny white clouds that settled too low to the ground.

Behind this quietly pastoral scene, vast mountains leap up from the backyard, a frozen tsunami of heather, exposed rock and cliffs. Your lonely lane, wide enough for two bicycles abreast, is lined by a wall built of stones stacked without mortar — a friendly wall, pierced by steps marked with a small wooden Public Footpath sign pointing into the fells beyond.

It’s the sort of scene you never expected to see outside a Thomas Kincaide print, or at best a carefully enhanced open-air museum. But this is no museum — it’s an ordinary farm in England’s Lake District. It’s just the natural look of the landscape.

Well, that last statement requires some qualification. It’s sort of the natural look. It has had a lot of help from poets, writers, private foundations and government officials.

The Lake District (also called Lakeland or simply The Lakes) is in England’s far northwest corner, a 900-square-mile oval island of hard, ancient mountains 40 miles long and 30 miles wide, surrounded on all sides by rich, level farmland. Called the Cumbrian Mountains, they are made up of old rocks that have withstood erosion over geologic eras. Their most remarkable features, however, are geologically recent. During the last half dozen ice ages, mile-thick glacial sheets have rolled over the Cumbrians, lowering the peaks and ridges to a dome that tops out at 4,000 feet.

Once each of these continental ice sheets retreated, small mountain glaciers formed near the peaks and squeezed their way down the valleys like toothpaste from a tube. Something like extra-strength toothpaste: These mountain glaciers bulldozed deep U-shaped valleys, typically with a half-mile of flat land at the bottom bordered by incredibly steep sides. Wherever one of these glaciers dug downward a little too enthusiastically, a lake now sits; other lakes (called tarns) formed in the high mountain bowls at each glacier’s source.

Altogether there are about 90 of these natural lakes, the longest (Lake Windermere) topping out at 10 miles. That’s a sizeable proportion of all the lakes, natural or otherwise, in England.

This gives us the characteristic view of the Lake District — a rich, broad meadow or shining lake, out of which jumps a line of cliffs so steep that it seems beyond the possibility of climbing. In point of fact, every one of these slopes can be safely surmounted with no more equipment than a stout hiking stick and a good pair of shoes. Just go around to the end of the valley carved by the mountain glacier, and walk up the smooth ridge left by the continental glacier.

The British respond to this beauty by loving it, simply and without precondition. Most of the British who visit the Lakes (14 million a year) seem to feel little need to do anything — kayak, golf, shop, get some exercise, ride a waterslide, whatever — beyond enjoying the scenery. Many are perfectly happy to pull their car off the road at a particularly lovely viewpoint, unfold a couple of chairs, pour tea from a thermos, and stare for half an hour while they sip their tea. Another popular venue is country pubs, which usually have terraces overlooking some remarkable scenery.

Of course not all the British are this passive in their enjoyment; they will walk for miles — not for exercise, but to enjoy the scenery more closely and intensely. The British will pay a lot to get close to a really beautiful spot, and they consider the Lakes to be the most beautiful spot in England. The Cumbrian economy thrives; the biggest problem is finding places to put all those beauty lovers without spoiling the scenery.

The Lakes weren’t always beautiful. That is, they looked just about the way they do now, but 300 years ago no one thought that was “beautiful.”

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Tags: British Heritage, Exploration, Historical Figures, Social History

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