57 Fun Facts About Lake District

Which children's TV character's home village of Greendale was inspired by the Lakeland valley of Longsleddale?

Postman Pat's creator John Cunliffe lived in Kendal when he devised the series, and the post office on his own street there, Greenside, was the model for Pat's.

What is the highest mountain in England, found in the Lake District?

Scafell Pike's summit was given to the nation in 1919 by its owner, Lord Leconfield, as a memorial to the men of the Lake District who served and died in the First World War.

England's highest mountain joins Snowdon and which Three Peaks summit?

Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the British Isles, completes the trio: walkers are driven from one mountain to the next and try to climb all three inside 24 hours, often to raise money for charity.

What arrived at the hamlet of Birthwaite in 1847 and gave rise to the modern town of Windermere?

The railway company named its terminus after the nearby lake, although no settlement of that name existed, and the town that grew up around the station took the name Windermere too.

Which is the deepest lake in England?

Wast Water was gouged so deep by an Ice Age glacier that its bed lies below sea level, even though its surface is about 60 metres above it.

A yearly contest at Lakeland's Santon Bridge crowns the world's biggest what?

Liar is the title at stake: the contest honours Will Ritson, a Victorian publican who told visitors that local turnips grew so big they were hollowed out as sheds; entrants get five minutes each and no props.

The Lake District joined which international list in 2017?

World Heritage Sites often bring wilderness or monuments to mind, but UNESCO listed the Lakes as a landscape shaped by centuries of hill farming and by the Picturesque and Romantic artists and writers it inspired.

Which is the only Lakeland lake officially named a 'Lake' rather than mere or water?

Bassenthwaite Lake is the only one with 'Lake' in its name, so quizzers like to say the Lake District has just one lake; the rest are all meres or waters, such as Esthwaite Water.

Which treat has Sarah Nelson's Lakeland shop baked since 1854?

Gingerbread to Sarah Nelson's recipe is still baked in her old cottage, once the village school, and the recipe is so closely guarded that it is kept locked in a bank vault.

What weather record does Seathwaite in Borrowdale hold?

Wettest inhabited place in England: damp Atlantic air is forced up over the high fells behind the hamlet and sheds its moisture as it cools, giving Seathwaite over three metres of rain a year.

Which industry grew up in Keswick thanks to a mineral mined in nearby Borrowdale?

Pencil making grew from Borrowdale's graphite, a deposit so pure and solid that it could simply be sawn into sticks; Keswick's first pencil factory opened in 1832.

In Neolithic times the Langdale Pikes were the site of a 'factory' producing what?

Stone axes were roughed out high on the Pikes from a hard volcanic rock, then finished and polished elsewhere and traded right across Britain and Ireland.

Which stone circle stands on a hilltop just outside Keswick, ringed by a panorama of Lakeland fells?

Castlerigg has never been firmly dated, because nobody has dug inside the ring since 1882; even its stone count runs from 38 to 42, depending on whether the small packing stones are included.

Which pop star's 2020 song 'The Lakes' daydreams about running away to the Lake District?

Taylor Swift released 'The Lakes' as the bonus track on her album Folklore, and slipped a pun on Wordsworth's name into the lyric as a nod to the district's Romantic past.

Wordsworth's 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' was inspired by daffodils on the shore of which lake?

Ullswater's shore near Gowbarrow is where the daffodils grew, but Wordsworth was far from lonely that day: he was walking with his sister Dorothy, whose journal for 15 April 1802 describes the same flowers.

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey are known collectively as what?

The Lake Poets got their label as an insult: the critic Francis Jeffrey sneered at the 'Lake school' in the Edinburgh Review, and the name stuck.

Which Lakeland home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth had been a roadside inn before they moved in?

Dove Cottage had been the Dove and Olive, an inn that closed in 1793, six years before the pair arrived; William later worked its 'greeting of good ale' into his poem The Waggoner.

In which house did Wordsworth spend his last 37 years, from 1813 until his death in 1850?

Rydal Mount became the family's final home in 1813, the year after two of their young children, Catherine and Thomas, had died within six months of each other.

Where is Wordsworth buried?

Grasmere churchyard holds his grave, beside St Oswald's Church; Westminster Abbey has a marble statue of him in Poets' Corner, but its inscription records that he is buried in Grasmere.

Beatrix Potter bought which farm at Near Sawrey in 1905 with the proceeds of her books?

Hill Top became her retreat and her model: its rooms and garden turn up in the pictures for The Tale of Tom Kitten and The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck.

On her death in 1943, Beatrix Potter left 4,000 acres of Lakeland farmland to which organisation?

The National Trust received her farms, her flocks and 4,000 acres; its co-founder Hardwicke Rawnsley had befriended her as a teenager and urged her to publish Peter Rabbit.

Which hardy Lakeland sheep breed did Beatrix Potter champion?

Herdwicks became her passion: she won prizes with her ewes through the 1930s, and when she died in 1943 she was president-elect of the breeders' association, the first woman chosen.

The Wasdale Head Inn calls itself the home of British what?

Rock climbing grew up here in the 1880s, when Victorian pioneers made the inn their base; Walter Parry Haskett Smith's 1886 ascent of nearby Napes Needle is often counted as the sport's starting point in England.

The old Lakeland sheep-counting rhyme 'Yan tan tethera' is thought to come from which linguistic roots?

Brittonic Celtic numbers are thought to lie behind the rhyme, which is why it echoes Welsh; shepherds counted in twenties, dropping a pebble in a pocket or moving a thumb along the crook for each score.

The Lakeland words 'fell', 'tarn' and 'beck' come from which language?

Old Norse gave fjall for a mountain, tjörn for a pool and bekkr for a stream; Scandinavian settlers carried the words to northern England, where they stuck to the map.

How did Wainwright make each page of his Pictorial Guides?

Pen and ink did it all: he drew every map and sketch and lettered the text by hand, and the books were printed straight from his manuscript; the 214 fells they cover are now known as 'the Wainwrights'.

Which long-distance footpath across northern England did Wainwright devise and publish as a guidebook in 1973?

The Coast to Coast Walk was Wainwright's west-to-east answer to the north-to-south Pennine Way, linking the Irish Sea at St Bees to the North Sea at Robin Hood's Bay through three national parks.

What was Wainwright's day job in Kendal while he wrote his Pictorial Guides?

Borough Treasurer was the top job in the office he had joined in 1941, when he left Blackburn for Kendal simply to live near the fells; he retired in 1967.

Where were Alfred Wainwright's ashes scattered after his death in 1991?

Innominate Tarn on Haystacks was his own choice: Haystacks was a favourite fell, and he had asked to be left beside the tarn's quiet water.

Which small lake lies enclosed between Helvellyn's Striding Edge and Swirral Edge?

Red Tarn fills the hollow between the two ridges, and in the nineteenth century it was dammed to raise the water level and help power the Greenside lead mine down the valley.

What unusual feat was achieved on the summit of Helvellyn in 1926?

A small aeroplane landed there on 22 December 1926: Bert Hinkler and John Leeming put an Avro Gosport down on the summit plateau and, after a short stay, got airborne again by diving off the edge to pick up speed.

What was the name of Donald Campbell's teddy-bear mascot, found floating after his fatal 1967 crash on Coniston Water?

Mr Whoppit floated free of the wreckage and was picked up by Campbell's team; his daughter Gina later took the same bear along as mascot on her own record attempts.

In which jet-powered hydroplane did Donald Campbell die on Coniston Water in January 1967?

Bluebird K7 had just touched 300 mph when it lifted off the water, somersaulted and sank; a diving team found the wreck more than thirty years later and raised it in 2001.

Kendal Mint Cake was among the supplies for which explorer's 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica?

Ernest Shackleton's expedition took Wiper's mint cake south; by legend the sweet began as a spoiled batch of clear mints that clouded when a Kendal confectioner looked away, and in 1953 it reached the top of Everest.

The Traditional Cumberland sausage, protected by the EU in 2011, must be sold in what form?

A long coil, never twisted into links, is the rule; since 2011 the protected name has also demanded at least 80% meat and a sausage made in its home county.

Which author set Swallows and Amazons on a Lakeland lake?

Arthur Ransome borrowed more than the setting: he gave three of the Altounyan children's names to his fictional Walkers after a summer teaching them to sail, though in later life he played the connection down.

Which Victorian critic spent his final years at Brantwood, a house beside Coniston Water?

John Ruskin bought the run-down Brantwood in 1871 and made it his home until he died there in 1900; by his own wish he was buried in the village churchyard at Coniston.

Behind a door in which fell above Derwent Water does Beatrix Potter's hedgehog washerwoman Mrs Tiggy-Winkle live?

Catbells is where little Lucie of Newlands finds the door in the hillside and stays for tea; years later the novelist Hugh Walpole made his home, Brackenburn, on the same slopes.

In Pride and Prejudice, which character is 'excessively disappointed' when her planned tour of the Lakes is cut short?

Elizabeth Bennet had hoped to see the Lakes with her aunt and uncle Gardiner; their shortened tour goes to Derbyshire instead, where she meets Darcy at Pemberley.

Which fish, often called Britain's rarest freshwater species, has its English stronghold in Derwent Water?

Vendace are at risk as the lakes warm, so in 2011 thousands of young fish were carried up the fellside on the backs of llamas to Sprinkling Tarn, a cooler refuge for the species.

A pair of which raptors nested in the Lake District in 2001, the first for over 150 years?

Ospreys were tempted back with a nest platform built for them in woods above a lake near Keswick; a pair moved in during 2001 and raised a chick, the first Lakeland brood in over 150 years.

Which pony breed native to Cumbria did Queen Elizabeth II ride in her later years?

The Fell pony, a hardy black or dark-brown breed from the Cumbrian fells, was the Queen's late-life riding mount; her Fell pony Emma stood at Windsor during her 2022 funeral procession.

Which pair of Lake District passes, joined by one narrow road, includes a climb as steep as 1 in 3?

Wrynose and Hardknott follow the line of a Roman road, guarded by a fort whose walls still stand beside the route; the 1 in 3 stretch comes on the Hardknott side.

Which dessert did Lakeland's Sharrow Bay hotel popularise in the 1970s?

Sticky toffee pudding made its name on Francis Coulson's menu at Sharrow Bay, but who invented it is disputed: one rival story traces the recipe to Canadian airmen in wartime Britain.

Which island in England's largest lake was renamed in the 18th century after a daughter of the Curwen family?

Belle Isle takes its name from Isabella Curwen, not from France: until then the island was plain Long Holme, and its distinctive round house still peeps through the trees.

Which playwright began his first hit comedy, its title borrowed from a Lakeland lake, while visiting the district in 1891?

Oscar Wilde started Lady Windermere's Fan on a summer stay in the Lakes, and seems to have taken other characters' names from northern towns too, such as Darlington and Berwick; it opened in London in 1892.

Which Borrowdale cascade did Robert Southey describe in an 1820 poem of tumbling rhymes?

Lodore Falls tumble down from Watendlath towards Derwent Water; Southey wrote 'The Cataract of Lodore' for his own children, and it opens with his little boy asking how the water comes down.

Which woman's 1698 ride through the Lake District, written up in her journal, is among its earliest recorded tourist visits?

Celia Fiennes toured England on horseback, side-saddle, and wrote it all down; Daniel Defoe, writing in the 1720s, was less charmed, calling the country 'the wildest, most barren and frightful' he had crossed in England.

What were the 'stations' listed in Thomas West's 1778 Guide to the Lakes?

Viewpoints for admiring the scenery: visitors would turn their backs on the view and study it in a tinted mirror called a Claude glass, and one station was later given windows of coloured glass.

Which upland area became the UK's first national park, just weeks before the Lake District followed?

The Peak District came first in April, with the Lake District three weeks behind; the Peak's Kinder Scout had seen the 1932 mass trespass, a landmark in the access campaign that led to the parks.

Which 868-metre Northern Fell is also known as Saddleback?

Blencathra, which Wainwright called 'one of the grandest objects in Lakeland', was put up for sale in 2014 by the Earl of Lonsdale to meet an inheritance tax bill; a crowdfunded local bid fell short and he took it off the market.

The Lake District is the UK's second-largest national park after which one?

The Cairngorms park is nearly twice the size, at about 4,500 square kilometres against 2,362, but it dates only from 2003; until then the Lake District had been the UK's largest national park for half a century.

The narrow-gauge steam railway from Ravenglass climbs into which valley?

Eskdale's little line, nicknamed La'al Ratty, opened in 1875 to haul iron ore down from the mines near Boot; today its steam trains carry visitors seven miles up the valley instead.

Which 1987 comedy sends two out-of-work actors to a Lake District cottage?

Withnail and I used Sleddale Hall, a lonely farmhouse near Shap, as Uncle Monty's cottage, and fans still seek it out; the film's 'Penrith' tearoom, though, was shot in Buckinghamshire.

Which water company is a major landowner in the Lake District National Park, holding the land around its reservoirs?

United Utilities inherited the valleys that Manchester bought and dammed for its water supply; the park authority itself owns less than 4% of the national park.

Honister Pass links Borrowdale with which valley?

Buttermere lies at the foot of the pass's western side; tourists once crossed it in horse-drawn coaches on a round trip from Keswick, passing the slate mine that still stands at the summit.

Which town at the head of England's largest lake has the tiny 17th-century Bridge House over Stock Beck?

Ambleside's Bridge House is thought to have begun as an apple store that doubled as a way across the beck to the family orchards, yet the tiny building was later a cobbler's, a tea-room and, at one time, home to a family of eight.