I’ve just noticed this morning that Amazon.co.uk have the Wainwright Walks complete BBC series 1 & 2 presented by Julia Bradbury on offer at half price for the DVD boxed set. (Click on the box)

This would be a great gift for someone who loves the English Lake District, or even for someone who needs introducing to Lakeland.  My recommendation would be to grab a set while they’re available at this price.

Also, if you’re a Julia Bradbury fan there are other DVDs available there: Wainwright Walks Coast To Coast [2009] and Railway Walks with Julia Bradbury [2009]. In fact there’s an amazing offer if you take all three together.

When, as a young lad, my great-grandad was running around the Lake District fells above High Swinklebank in Longsleddale “helping” his father with the sheep there was no way he could have pictured the life of a 21st century youngster.

In the mid-19th century there were no cars and other motors, let alone television. No Postman Pat trundled up the vale in his little red van to deliver the daily mail. This was a remote place in those days.

A century and a half later millions of children (and adults too!) came to love watching Pat deliver longingly-anticipated envelopes and parcels to the good people of Greendale, originally based on the Longsleddale valley.

Now the Westmorland Gazette reports that Pat is to hit the big screen in a 3-D animated feature length film. I look forward to it in my return to childhood.

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.

On Friday I relaunched my “England’s Lakes” site.

The original version was created using a semi-automated site-builder.  That was good for speed, but unfortunately as the site developed it become too difficult to control the layout and content as precisely as I wished.  So now it’s entirely restructured and much easier to manage.

Most of the old features are still there with the exception of the news feed.  That was giving unpredictable results, so until I’ve figured out how to control it better I’ve decided to take it off.  Similarly, the automatic feed of Amazon items was sometimes generating irrelevant adverts in the sidebar; so that also has been removed and replaced by a few of my own hand-pick Amazon items with a clear relationship to the Lake District.

More pages are being added steadily, and existing pages are being expanded.  Our own hotel finder will be here very shortly (hopefully later this week), and many of the pages now include photographs from the Francis Frith collection.

I’ve also launched an English Lake District Hub Page which will parallel some of the content on the main site but I suspect that like my “England’s Lakes” Squidoo lens it will gradually take on a character of its own.

Happy “Laking”,

- David -

I am not a fisherman! That needs to be made clear from the start. I’m not going to pretend on this blog or web site to be the possessor of either knowledge or experience in this field. When my children were in their teens, twenty-five or more years ago, I had a short-lived urge to fish with them but it never developed (a bit like my golf!) … and then some burglars took my tackle and I never got around to replacing it.

So, where can I refer people for good solid information about fishing in the Lake District? I’ll certainly include short snippets on the pages about individual lakes or rivers based on information drawn from others, but for real information from experts I’ll have to send you elsewhere.

Fortunately there is such a place. It’s a marvelous site called, believe it or not, “Lake District Fishing“. Take a look at it. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes