Lake District

Lake District, region of mountains and lakes, Cumbria, north-western England. A popular tourist destination since Victorian times, the Lake District is one of the most scenic areas of England. The area’s many lakes, or meres, mountain tarns and streams, waterfalls, bleak fells, and craggy mountains offer a variety of scenery unmatched elsewhere in the country. The Lake District is a very compact area extending only about 50 km (30 mi) from north to south and about 40 km (25 mi) from east to west and rising in four points to a height of over 900 m (3,000 ft). Scafell Pike (978 m/3,209 ft), in the west of the Lake District, is the highest point. The other main peaks are Skiddaw (931 m/3,053 ft) and High Peak (710 m/2,329 ft) in the north, and Helvellyn (950 m/3,118 ft) in the east. The scenery of the area, and in particular its most noted feature, the lakes, is a result mainly of glaciation during the last Ice Age. The lakes lie in broad U-shaped valleys, scoured out between the highlands by the glaciers. The most important are Lake Windermere, Derwent Water, Coniston Water, Ullswater, Ennerdale Water, Crummock Water, and Bassenthwaite Lake.

The Lake District became famous when a group of British poets (including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey) made it their home about the beginning of the 19th century; they were described by unsympathetic critics as the Lake School of poetry (see Lake Poets). In 1906, 304 hectares (750 acres) on Ullswater were set apart as a national park. The Lake District National Park now incorporates 2,292 sq km (885 sq mi) of the region.