THE CULTURE

There’s only one ‘natural heritage’ World Heritage Site in Britain, and guess what? It isn’t the Lake District (FYI it’s the Jurassic Coast of Devon and Dorset). Lakeland is actually a World Heritage Site for both natural and cultural heritage combined. Every step you take in Lakeland, you’re tracking the inkspots of somebody famous who already wrote about it in wonderful prose, or else perhaps a poem.

William Wordsworth and his gang of Lakeland poets pretty much invented Lakeland. William W lived in three separate houses here, as otherwise the tourist pressure at Dove Cottage Grasmere would have burst the place apart. He walked all over Lakeland, wrote poems on top of Helvellyn and along the Duddon valley, and on 15th April 1802 spotted daffs along the Ullswater shoreline.

Potter around on a lake and you’re doing it in tribute to Arthur Ransome, and I bet the boat you’re doing it in is called either ‘Amazon’ or ‘Swallow’. Potter about on dry land and you’re even more literally pottering. Beatrix Pottering, who not only sent a hedgehog up Cat Bells but a squirrel up the trees and a rabbit into the lettuce patch, both on the side of Derwent Water. Potter was also a founder of the National Trust, and the big promoter of the chunky brown Herdwick sheep. Need any more convincing? She was played in the movie by Renée Zellweger – now that’s cultural heritage for you.

Climb Carrock Fell in a thunderstorm and you’re only doing it as a tribute act to Charles Dickens in September 1857. Get spouty at Lodore

Falls – that’s poet Robert Southey.

Fall off Striding Edge and you might get written up in rhyme not just by Wordsworth but by Sir Walter Scott as well. Climb the rocks and you’re indulging a cultural activity that Lakeland invented on the Napes Needle in July 1886.

Lots of famous people went to the Lakes. But that’s not really the point. Up until 1750, hills were horrible. The whole idea of going to look at them, clambering about on them, going for long walks across the tops, this was invented over the next 50 years or so, in the Lake District. Culminating in the great nine-day backpack trip of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in August 1802. He crossed a dozen summits, dropped into five of the valleys, and made the first recorded rock climb by way of an unplanned descent of Broad Stand on Scafell.

Head up Helvellyn, and you’re not just walking up a hill. You’re performing a Cultural Act.