My time in the Lake District has been very limited so far this year but I did get three days there last week, the primary reason for the visit being to visit elderly relatives. In addition to an overnight in Workington I managed to spend two nights in one of the sleeping ‘pods’ of a large tent belonging to some friends on a camp site near Threlkeld and attended a few meetings at the Keswick Convention, an annual inter-denominational Christian event drawing thousands of people every year and that has been running for around 130 years since being started by a local vicar in the mid-1870s. It was also possible to fit in a couple of afternoon trips into areas easily accessible from Keswick.

Earlier in the week the weather had been wet (as is necessary to fill the rivers and lakes, so we shouldn’t complain too much about it) but my days there were quite pleasant. Friday afternoon took me with two friends past Bassenthwaite to Cockermouth where we enjoyed a late lunch at the Trout Hotel and followed this with a drive to see Loweswater, Crummock Water, Buttermere, Honister Pass, Borrowdale and Derwentwater. I love the northern lakes. They’re so much less congested with traffic and people than the honeypot areas of Windermere, Ambleside, etc, beautiful as those areas are.

The contrasting scenery of Loweswater and Buttermere, the different shaped valleys, the sudden transition from the steep scree-covered slopes of Honister to the greenery of Borrowdale, all these made for a great afternoon. As we drove along we talked of The Secret Valley and the Herries Chronicles, fictional accounts of this fascinating landscape. What a pity that having passed Lodore we didn’t have time to visit Watendlath and Ashness Bridge.

It was announced a few days ago that The Great North Swim, organised by Nova International, a company founded by Brendan Foster the 1976 Olympic bronze medallist, is to be held again at Windermere in the English Lake District.

Last year was its first, and was oversubscribed at 2,500 entries.  This year it will be spread over 2 days, September 12th and 13th, allowing 5,000 people to take part.  In addition to the big names of swimming it is expected that thousands of ordinary people will swim the mile-long open water course from a spot on the lake shore by the Low Wood Hotel.

If you’re a swimmer there’s time to train, but possibly very little time to enter as this event is likely to be extremely popular and places are limited.

A range of charities will benefit from this outstanding Lake District event, including Diabetes UK, Cancer Research UK and Lifeboats to mention only three.

The High Court has ruled in favour of the Lake District National Park Authority and its Windermere lake speed limit. A group known as the Keep Windermere Alive Association had attempted to trigger a full legal review of the speed limit which was imposed four years ago.

The response to this will inevitably be mixed, with some of the boating community distraught but many others pleased at the preservation of a quieter lake environment.

I’m old enough to remember when colour photographs, either Lake District photos or any others, were rare. Nearly all of us had black and white film in our cameras, and such colour photos as there were tended to have very poor colour quality.

Then along came affordable good quality colour film. Like many others I moved over from prints to 35mm slides. It saved printing cost and you could project them onto a screen or wall to show to family and friends. Only much later did I revert to printed photos, but somehow I never felt that my colour prints had quite the same character as the old black and white.

Recently I’ve been examining the Francis Frith archive and have been delighted to find some excellent photos. These are not only the street scenes of towns and villages for which the archive is possibly best known, but also lake and mountain views.

Ullswater, 1888.
Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith.

The above photograph of Ullswater, taken in 1888, is one example of the wealth of photographic Lake District beauty available on the Frith site. The Crummock Water scene below is another. I’m currently collecting a set of my favourites for display on a new lake district photos site. Meanwhile I’ve created a few pages of vintage photos at thelakedistrict.inoldphotos.com

Crummock Water, 1893.
Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith.

I think it will be clear by now that my own answer to the question in the title, “Must Lake District Photos be in Colour?” is a resounding “No!”

I came across a Lake District photograph this afternoon and felt I had to share it here. The site on which I saw it gave permission to use the photos it displays. Just in time I discovered that my latest “find” had in fact been stolen from someone’s portfolio, should not have been on the site where I found it, and to display it here would have been a breach of copyright. It was a stunning lake scene with snow-tipped mountains in the distance. I wish I could take photos like that!

To me it was yet another illustration of the variety of pursuits to which the English Lake District so wonderfully lends itself. Walking, climbing, boating, fishing, cycling, ….. . The list goes on and on, but whereas all of those can give much pleasure to the person directly engaged in the occupation Lake District photographs can bring pleasure to many others beside the photographer.

Well I can’t show that particular photo here just yet, but decided to post a modified version of what I’d written about it. If I can track down the photographer I’ll try to get permission.  I did think of putting an alternative here, but my mind was so full of the one I’d seen that to show another immediately now would almost inevitably be presenting it as second-best, however goood it might be.

In the past I’ve mentioned here a variety of energetic activities in the Lake District – running, walking and cycling.  On September 13th, however, there’s a new one.  It’s the “Great North Swim” – a mile in Windermere.  (No, I won’t call it “Lake” Windermere as in some of its publicity; there’s only one lake in the Lake District and that’s Bassenthwaite Lake!)

Anyway, whatever the water’s called, it’s going to be a cold wet experience in which around a thousand people are expected to participate – including some of Britain’s finest swimmers.

Several charities will be benefiting, including The British Red Cross and Marie Curie Cancer Care.

For more on this see Swimming in Windermere.

That’s all for now,

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes

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

The redevelopment of Waterhead, Ambleside, was bound to be controversial. Reconciliation of the many inevitably conflicting interests are difficult enough in an ordinary town or village but when it’s in a national park, and especially when it’s by Windermere, you can guarantee a good debate.

The Westmorland Gazette a few days ago published an article on the latest compromise proposal. Here’s the link so that you can follow what is being talked about for the future of this important area on the Windermere shore.

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes

In an article about Bassenthwaite Lake on my English Lakes site I mentioned the Lake District Osprey Project, and provided a link to the video camera. The watchers up in the Lake District this year believe (from observing the behviour of the parent birds) that at least one chick has now hatched.

Down at Rutland Water the Rutland Osprey Project is watching two nests this year, one occupied by the pair that have nested there for several years and the other by a couple in which the female is a four-year-old offspring from the older local pair. The first pair appear to have three chicks but the second have had problems recently, and observers fear that the eggs may have been damaged; no chicks have been seen. If you’re based in, or passing through, the East Midlands don’t miss a visit to Rutland Water. It’s a beautiful area, a few miles to the west of the A1 trunk road, south of Newark and Grantham and not far from Stamford. The Rutland Water Nature Reserve has superb visitor centres at Egleton and Lyndon, close to the water.

The two projects have excellent web sites:

• The Rutland Osprey Project
• The Lake District Osprey Project

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes

What is now the Keswick Country House Hotel was originally built by the company that in 1865 launched the Cockermouth, Keswick & Penrith Railway. As their new railway line into the northern Lake District replaced the previous three-hour (minimum!) journey from the Penrith mainline station by horse-drawn coach, the tourist trade expanded rapidly. A new hotel was needed alongside the station. A hundred and forty years later the hotel has adopted twentyfirst century standards while the station house now houses several executive class rooms as an extension of the hotel. The trains stopped coming to Keswick more than thirty-five years ago.

Last night while searching through a pile of old Lake District brochures in my study, looking for something entirely different from what I eventually found, I came across a book I’d forgotten about but which I presumably bought on a visit to Keswick some years back. It kept me up late reading. Here it is, a fascinatingly detailed account of the history of the railway line that ran east to west across the northern lakes area.

I’ve created a page about it on our English Lakes site with the title, “By Train to Keswick“, but if you really want to know more about this piece of Lake District history, click on the book here to see whether there’s a copy available from Biblio.com. Alternatively, try Amazon.co.uk.

Note: This book seems now to be quite rare. Shop around between the two sources here, as each will probably list several alternative book dealers – and prices tend to vary widely.

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes