The Lake District National Park is a national park in the county of Cumbria in the North West of England. It is one of the fifteen national parks in the United Kingdom. The park was established in 1951 and measures 2362 square kilometers.

The Lake District is a mountainous region. In this area are all the peaks of England higher than 900 meters above sea level. The highest, at 978 meters, is Scafell Pike. The area has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since July 2017.

The Lake District has sixteen lakes, mostly oblong in shape, which can be explained by the fact that in the Pleistocene Ice Age, the river valleys were transformed into broad trough valleys by glaciers. The most famous lakes are Windermere (14.7 km²), Coniston Water, Ullswater, Thirlmere, Derwent Water and Bassenthwaite Lake. Buttermere, Crummock Water and Loweswater also testify to the natural beauty in the Lake District.

Notable hills include Coniston Old Man, Scafell, Scafell Pike, Skiddaw, Great Gable, and Helvellyn. The hills are rugged and suitable for long walks with lots of natural beauty, including difficult routes that are more suitable for mountain climbers. However, if the weather changes when people are not prepared for it, it is quite easy to find themselves in dangerous conditions.

The climate is very humid: it rains and snows a lot. In some places, where the ocean wind, heated and humidified by the Gulf Stream, blows up against the hills and loses its moisture during take-off and cooling, 3000 mm of precipitation falls per year (Netherlands: 700–800 mm). The landscape is therefore always very green. It is especially cold at higher altitudes, the lower valleys are protected by the Gulf Stream.

Sheep farming, tourism and forestry are of economic importance.

Tourism

Tourism has also been an important economic factor for a long time. Tourist centers are mainly the towns of Keswick, Grasmere, Windermere, Hawkshead and Ambleside.

The lakes gained national fame in Victorian times through the Romantic poets William Wordsworth (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and Robert Southey, all residents of the area for shorter or longer periods of time and collectively known as the Lake Poets.

Later Beatrix Potter, the artist and writer of the stories with Peter Rabbit, among others, became a famous resident, whose house can still be viewed in Hawkshead and whose sugary pictures of fluffy animals with clothes are still in every porcelain souvenir shop and all kinds of other items for sale. to be. An attraction dedicated to the work of Beatrix Potter can be found in Bowness-on-Windermere. The houses of the poet William Wordsworth, Dove Cottage, Rydal Mount and his grave can be seen in Grasmere.