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there’s a different prospect or view every few yards as you stroll up a fell.

You would think that, with millions turning up, the place would be ruined. Miraculously, despite a certain wear and tear, this is still recognisably what it was in Wordsworth’s day. You can walk for hours on the fells and scarcely meet a soul. Paths that are eroded are swiftly rebuilt by hardy and devoted volunteers.

When I walk around the lakes these days, save for the increased traffic on the winding and difficult roads (very easily avoided if you don’t drive), it is immediately a more peaceful, better-mannered, I might even say more philosophical, world than I encounter anywhere else. The place provokes thought and promises renewal.

When I was at school, the Cumbrian dialect was widely spoken by the inhabitants. We know that Wordsworth spoke with a Cumbrian twang and some of his poetry only makes sense if you use a Northern voice — for instance, ‘water’ has to rhyme with ‘matter’. Various forces are eroding the local tongue — radio, television — but it holds on, and now, as in other parts of britain, there is a fight-back.

but, above all, it’s a place which lines the memory. You remember when you were hesitating on the vertiginous steeps of striding Edge — a narrow ridge high up a fell called Helvellyn — and looked below, down sheer drops, on little patchwork fields, while ahead of you was still the cairn or the peak you had to reach.

You remember sitting next to a waterfall with sandwiches and a flask of tea, and listening to the water and the birds and looking out at a wonderful, calm, free landscape, and thinking: ‘It doesn’t get much better than this.’

You remember coming back from the walk like a drowned rat and laughing it off and enjoying having gone through the deluge. and then finding a good warm pub with good warm grub.

It is difficult to over-praise its charm. You take a little side path here, you scramble up towards a ridge there, and yet another prospect opens out before you, even when, above, heavy bellied clouds are scudding over threateningly from the atlantic, looking for somewhere to shed their load.

and then there are the boats on the lakes. on Derwentwater, the boats act as buses. seven or eight stops around the lake. Hop on hop off. almost quaint, but not quite, because it’s so practical. and everywhere you look you see evidence of those who were here before you. striking remains of Celtic and roman fortresses. Grand houses which dramatically increased in number in the 19th century (many of them now country hotels).

That was when the magnates from the Industrial revolution refused to go south to the playgrounds of those who were born rich, and colonised the lake District as their own nature resort.

The lake District is, in many ways, still a world unto itself. still small villages, local sports, fell-running, Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling and hound trailing. It has grandeur. It has grit. It affords pleasures on so many levels — solitude, companionship and ceaseless reminders of the splendours from sunrise to sunset of Nature at its most jewelled.

unesco is very lucky to have the lake District on its list.