“The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot”

This quote from 79-year-old German film director Werner Herzog – who’s spent a lifetime dragging cameras up volcanoes, over mountains and into jungles – most definitely wasn’t spoken in direct relation to the 912 square miles of soggy northern England that make up the Lake District National Park. But it might as well have been.

The Lakes is one of those places everyone thinks they know well. With an estimated 20 million annual visitors piling in from the M6 to gorge on honeypots like Keswick and Ambleside, chew up footpaths on Scafell Pike and Helvellyn, then down a few pints of Wainwright ale before heading back home with aching legs and glowing cheeks, it’s hardly somewhere that needs to explain itself to anybody.