It was the year before I was married. (I’ll let you work out when that was; I’m just indicating that it was well within living memory). Windermere was frozen over for several weeks during that winter, and for the first time for many years it was safe to skate over large areas of its surface.

Going back a bit further - that is, a few thousand years - not only was the lake frozen, but it was under several hundred feet of ice as the glaciers of the most recent ice age (I won’t say “the last”, as it might not be, in spite of what we’re told about global warming) …. Anyway, as I was saying, just over ten thousand years ago Windermere was under a massive glacier.

Strictly speaking that isn’t true, for at that time there was no Windermere. There were two much smaller lakes, one up at the Ambleside end, and another down toward Newby Bridge. In between the two, Claife Heights (now on the western side of northern Windermere) and Cartmel Fell (now on the eastern side of southern Windermere) were joined together in one continuous belt of hills, and the two lakes were in totally separate valleys ….. although both valleys were invisible under the cold solid white stuff.

As the glacier crawled its way down toward the sea at Morecambe Bay it carved a swathe through the hillside and allowed the waters of the two lakes (once they’d thawed, centuries later) to run together and create a single lake, the longest in England, that we now know and love as Windermere.

My bookcases have for decades now carried a wide range of books about the Lake District. However, I have very few that focus on just a single lake … because there are very few such books in existence. There is, however, an excellent book about Windermere: Portrait of Windermere, by Christopher Taylor. I bought mine twenty-five years ago when it first came out and have dipped into it repeatedly down the years. The paragraphs above owe much to my most recent dipping.   Click on the title or the graphic above to find a copy through Biblio.com

Or click on this link for more on other Lake District Books

That’s all for now,

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes

I have for many years found it fascinating to look at the different kinds of traditional buildings in the Lake District, Since the 1970s I have often carried with me a copy of R. W. Brunskill’s paperback field handbook, Vernacular Architecture of the Lake Counties.

Another book that has been on my shelves for more than twenty-five years is Palmer’s Historic Farmhouses in and around Westmorland, which I find especially interesting as my own forebears at various times down the centuries have lived in two of the featured properties.

An early-1990s work is Susan Denyer’s Traditional Buildings & Life in the Lake District, and even more recent (2006) is Brunskill’s Traditional Buildings of Cumbria.

Three of these can be found on the secondhand network although the Palmer book is rare and pricey (try our book search page at BrunleaBooks for access to several large networks of independent dealers around the world) whereas the latest Brunskill book can be bought new from Foyles of London, and when I last looked there was a good discount.

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes

Twenty-five years ago and more I was spending a large proportion of my professional life in the Lake District, driving up most days from Blackburn where I then lived and often staying overnight in Carlisle, or Keswick, or over in the west of the region at Eskdale Green.

I’d known the southern areas and fringes of the Lake District, the parts in Lancashire and Westmorland, fairly well from a very young age as my family came from there and I spent many childhood holidays by the Duddon and on my uncle’s farm at Gawthwaite. Now, however, in the early-80s my involvement as an adviser to several large clients, including major aspects of the economic and administrative development of the ten-year-old county of Cumbria, meant that I had to learn about it from a wide variety of other perspectives.

The late Dr. William Rollinson of the University of Liverpool was immensely helpful to the team that I was leading, briefing us on the economic and social history of the region. On my Lake District Squidoo lens I’ve given some prominence to one of Bill’s later books, his updated edition of Collingwood’s classic, The Lake Counties, sadly now out of print but sometimes available on the secondhand market. Click above on the title to see if there’s a copy available on Biblio.com. If not, try here at Amazon.co.uk

A book which I bought at the time and devoured as part of my personal briefing was by two other academics, John Marshall and John Walton, both from the University of Lancaster. The Lake Counties from 1830 to the mid-twentieth century is 300 pages of concentrated information and insight on the development of this part of the country and, unlike much academic output, is highly readable.

Click on the link above to see whether there’s currently a copy available. If you want to understand the Lake District and the past couple of centuries of its development this is, in my opinion, a “must-read”.

[Note: I have never had a problem in buying secondhand books from any book dealer over the internet, but please note carefully what the seller says about the edition and the condition.]

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes