I recently saw a website belonging to a road building company that bemoaned the usurping of the term hardcore by the porn industry when its traditional use was to describe the stone and other crushed aggregates that provide the base for roads and paths. I agree, and am going to avoid the modern sophisticated “aggregates” in favour of the older “hardcore”.

What has this to do with lakes and the Lake District?  Well, the Westmorland Gazette this week carries an interesting story about an innovative use of fleeces from the region’s Herdwick sheep. Apparently fleeces laid down over water-logged ground provide an excellent substrate over which to lay a layer of hardcore (or more poshly, “aggregate”) when making a path.

When you’re next walking the Lake District hills you might well be walking literally on the backs of the sheep. What a nice thought that when fleece prices are so low there’s an environmentally friendly alternative use, and apparently it’s not even just a modern innovation; our forefathers used to do similar things centuries ago.

For a fascinating read about the amazing Herdwick, the sheep breed that for centuries has survived the worst that the Lake District fell weather has been able to throw at them, see the recent book by Geoff Brown. Click on the image for more details.

I think the first time I heard of the Friends of the Lake District, or at least the first time they really hit my consciousness to any significant degree, was during their campaign to preserve Ennerdale Water and Wastwater in the late-70s and early-80s.

At that time I was visiting the area frequently as a management adviser to British Nuclear Fuels and my first awareness of the struggle over how much water could be  taken from the lakes without damaging the environment was very much conditioned by what I heard within the company – although my own work was nothing at all to do with that particular subject.  Gradually I came to realise, however, that even within BNFL there were many who had considerable sympathy with the cause of protecting the future of the lakes.  After all, most of the people employed there lived in the area and loved it.

This isn’t the place for a long article about one particular campaign.  The story was well told by Geoffrey Berry in his 1982 book, A Tale of Two Lakes: The Fight to Save Ennerdale Water and Wastwater, which is now available only secondhand but click on the link and you might well find a decent copy at Amazon.

The main reason for writing today is to flag up the 75th anniversary of this excellent campaigning organisation which has done so much to help preserve the Lake District and wider Cumbrian landscape heritage since its foundation in 1934. For more, see the Friends of the Lake District website.