When is a lake not a lake?

We returned from our break in the Lake District utterly exhausted and full of aches and pains, desperately in need of a break. This may have had something to do with walking some 40 km in four days and driving the 236 miles back in one four hour go. Just in case my physical condition was down to something else, I took a lateral flow test for Covid upon returning home, half-expecting a positive result, but it was negative. Can all this exercise actually be good for you?

It was my first visit to the Lakes for around 40 years and I can’t honestly make a comparison to how things used to be. We stayed in Bowness on Windermere which is the town on Lake Windermere and not Windermere, which is further up a rather steep hill. To make matters even more complicated, Lake Windermere isn’t actually a lake at all. There’s only one lake in the Lake District which is Bassenthwaite. The others, including the biggest, Windermere, are actually tarns, meres and waters. This greatly appeals to the pedant in me.

Bowness is a pleasant enough town, with a selection of restaurants, okay pubs (with the exception of the magnificent Hole Int Wall), shops full of tat, shops full of upmarket tat, almost all of which are shut by 9.00pm. The feel is in some ways like a Cornish coastal town. So many properties are second homes, rentals and so on. That’s certainly a problem for local people who can’t get on the inflated housing ladder because of people like me who want to stay there.

The biggest shock for us was the state of ‘Lake’ Windermere itself. There’s no way of getting round this but Windermere is full of shit. We didn’t see the algal blooms that are infecting the water, but the tell-tale signs of human waste are not hard to find. In the sunshine, the lake is quite beautiful and indeed we thoroughly enjoyed our boat trip to Ambleside but the thought that we were bobbling along on sewage was a pretty grim thought.

For all that, we thoroughly enjoyed Cumbria. I achieved a rather sad life ambition by doing some train-spotting at Scout Green on the slopes of the legendary Shap incline. We drove from Penrith via Ullswater and the Kirkstone Pass where old pal Nick and I had, unbelievably it seems today, hiked and camped along the way back in 1980 and much of it was beautifully unspoiled, the scenery as stunning as it always has been. And visiting in November meant that whilst Lakeland was busy in the big tourist areas, it wasn’t rammed like it gets in high summer.

Miraculously, it barely rained, which is very un-Lake District. And the wardrobe of cold weather gear we brought along wasn’t needed in the end.

All in all, the most tiring break I’ve ever been on and one we’d do again, albeit at a different venue.

HIGH POINT – The Hole Int Wall at Bowness

LOW POINT – Not getting to visit the only lake in the Lake District.