Discover, explore, be inspired

The Lake District, England’s largest National Park is now a World Heritage Site, home to Scafell Pike – its highest mountain, Wastwater – its deepest lake and thriving communities like Keswick and Bowness-on-Windermere.

The area is also intimately associated with English literature of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Thomas Gray was the first to bring the region to attention, when he wrote a journal of his Grand Tour in 1769, but it was William Wordsworth (right) whose poems were most famous and influential. Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, inspired by the sight of daffodils on the shores of Ullswater, remains one of the most famous in the English language. Out of his long life of eighty years, sixty were spent amid its lakes and mountains, first as a schoolboy at Hawkshead, and afterwards living in Grasmere and Rydal Mount. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey became known as the Lake Poets.

During the early 20th century, the children’s author Beatrix Potter was in residence at Hill Top Farm, setting many of her famous Peter Rabbit books in the Lake District.

For more inspiration on visiting the lakes why not go to www.lakedistrict.gov.uk