Lake District Trivia
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57 free Lake District trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Lake District trivia quiz covers England's best-loved national park from its highest fell to its deepest lake and the writers who made it famous. The easy questions handle the county, Scafell Pike, Windermere, the Lake Poets and the only lake with 'Lake' in its name. From there it moves into the landscape's stories: the wettest village in England, Keswick's pencils, the Neolithic axe factory, the Norse words behind fell and tarn, and the sheep breed Beatrix Potter fought to preserve. The harder end is for fell-walkers and Lakeland regulars: Wainwright's day job and where his ashes went, the aeroplane on Helvellyn's summit, Wordsworth's rent at Dove Cottage, the lake where Campbell set his 1955 record before Coniston claimed him, the fish that survives only in Derwent Water, and the 1698 traveller who crossed Kirkstone Pass on horseback. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the Lake District, its lakes, fells, towns, people and produce, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our England geography, William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which children's TV character's home village of Greendale was inspired by the Lakeland valley of Longsleddale?
Postman Pat
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.
Q 02What is the highest mountain in England, found in the Lake District?
Scafell Pike
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.
Q 03England's highest mountain joins Snowdon and which Three Peaks summit?
Ben Nevis
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.
Q 04What arrived at the hamlet of Birthwaite in 1847 and gave rise to the modern town of Windermere?
The railway
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.
Q 05Which is the deepest lake in England?
Wast Water
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.
Q 06A yearly contest at Lakeland's Santon Bridge crowns the world's biggest what?
Liar
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.
Q 07The Lake District joined which international list in 2017?
World Heritage Sites
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.
Q 08Which is the only Lakeland lake officially named a 'Lake' rather than mere or water?
Bassenthwaite
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.
Q 09Which treat has Sarah Nelson's Lakeland shop baked since 1854?
Gingerbread
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.
Q 10What weather record does Seathwaite in Borrowdale hold?
Wettest inhabited place in England
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.
Q 11Which industry grew up in Keswick thanks to a mineral mined in nearby Borrowdale?
Pencil making
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.
Q 12In Neolithic times the Langdale Pikes were the site of a 'factory' producing what?
Stone axes
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.
Q 13Which stone circle stands on a hilltop just outside Keswick, ringed by a panorama of Lakeland fells?
Castlerigg
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.
Q 21On her death in 1943, Beatrix Potter left 4,000 acres of Lakeland farmland to which organisation?
The National Trust
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.
Q 22Which hardy Lakeland sheep breed did Beatrix Potter champion?
Herdwick
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.
Q 23The Wasdale Head Inn calls itself the home of British what?
Rock climbing
Q 14Which pop star's 2020 song 'The Lakes' daydreams about running away to the Lake District?
Taylor Swift
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.
Q 15Wordsworth's 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' was inspired by daffodils on the shore of which lake?
Ullswater
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.
Q 16Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey are known collectively as what?
The Lake Poets
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.
Q 17Which Lakeland home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth had been a roadside inn before they moved in?
Dove Cottage
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.
Q 18In which house did Wordsworth spend his last 37 years, from 1813 until his death in 1850?
Rydal Mount
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.
Q 19Where is Wordsworth buried?
Grasmere churchyard
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.
Q 20Beatrix Potter bought which farm at Near Sawrey in 1905 with the proceeds of her books?
Hill Top
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.
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.
Q 24The old Lakeland sheep-counting rhyme 'Yan tan tethera' is thought to come from which linguistic roots?
Brittonic Celtic
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.
Q 25The Lakeland words 'fell', 'tarn' and 'beck' come from which language?
Old Norse
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.
Q 26How did Wainwright make each page of his Pictorial Guides?
Pen and ink
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'.
Q 27Which long-distance footpath across northern England did Wainwright devise and publish as a guidebook in 1973?
The Coast to Coast Walk
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.
Q 28What was Wainwright's day job in Kendal while he wrote his Pictorial Guides?
Borough Treasurer
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.
Q 29Where were Alfred Wainwright's ashes scattered after his death in 1991?
Innominate Tarn on Haystacks
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.
Q 30Which small lake lies enclosed between Helvellyn's Striding Edge and Swirral Edge?
Red Tarn
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.