Broadening the appeal of the Lake District

It’s ‘horses for courses’ isn’t it? When I was a young child, living in a poor area of Sheffield, I had a view from my bedroom windows of Peak District moorland and the more I watched its changing seasons, the more desperately I wanted to go and see it for myself. My mother and father had no interest in “the country” but did relent one day under the weight of my nagging, and we caught the bus to a nearby beauty spot, where, much to my disappointment, we sat and ate sandwiches and then came home! No walking, no scrambling about on the enticing gritstone boulders; just that. They hated it; my mother, especially, found it rather menacing, and they were not alone among their peers in having no preference for it, but had it been a day trip to a garish seaside resort, it would have been me that hated it and they who relished it. I had to wait until my teens when I got out and discovered it’s joys for myself, and I have loved it ever since. It was working class men and women who gave us ‘the right to roam’ with the Kinder trespass, and we should be ever grateful to them, but you can’t force people to love the countryside, no matter their class or ethnic origin, and any amount of tinkering with the landscape isn’t going to change that.

As regards non-white visitors, however beautiful the countryside, IMO in some cultures walking for enjoyment in what may often be chilly, wet and windy conditions, just isn’t a Thing.
I say that having lived in countries with different cultures, where, generally speaking, walking was something you did only if you had no alternative. Going anywhere for e.g. a family picnic would tend to involve as short a walk as possible from wherever you left the car.

Heat was certainly a factor, but I dare say the not walking for fun mindset may continue in a family who moved to the U.K. even a generation or so ago.

And give back the million pounds donated by Anthony Hopkins

Surely not Callistemon , there are still stones and rocks there ? How can people have an afternoon stroll if these are not cleared .

Slice the top 1,500 ft off, tarmac the rest , have parking spaces
for burger vans , place garden benches every 100 yards .

Sadly nothing can be done about the rain.

Cloud on Snowdon? What a surprise
And it's a bit lumpy too Anniebach

We took our caravan to the Lake District a couple of years ago. That bit was fine. Campsite lovely. But off site? We did walk a bit in the area, as far as we are physically able, but wanted to see the lakes. The few parking spots there are were all full so we cruised around in a long stream of other cars cruising around, squeezing past each other and getting jammed in by coaches. And it wasn’t even high season. We took to only going out after half past five in the evening when everyone had gone home. I was amazed to read that Those That Be want to encourage even more visitors!

I had visited the Lakes before in my youth and was surprised that it hadn’t re-wooded itself naturally more than it has. Are sheep still overgrazing?

Now we have a campervan we consider the Lake District as being out of bounds for us. Yorkshire is lovely though!

Cloud on Snowdon ? What a surprise

The long white cloud in New Zealand is a spectacular high altitude lenticular cloud, we get similar smaller phenomena in the UK, always thousands of feet above the peaks.
Moist air cools as it rises so hills and mountains are always going to be cloud prone, in summer as the air temperature rises during the day the cloud also rises and clears the highest peaks. In winter the temperature seldom rises enough for that to happen
Whenever we have an airstream coming off the Atlantic we are going to get cloud, more so no western areas less in the East.

the path is relentless, starts straight away going up hill said one man climbing Snowdon.

Perhaps he should have read the definition of mountain before he set off
"A large natural elevation of the earth's surface rising abruptly from the surrounding level.

They are often topped by cloud - air rises then cools forcing the water vapour to condense, causing orographic clouds to form.
There is a more scientific explanation but I think I learnt that in primary school.

New Zealand- Land of the Long White Cloud

Opening up the Snowdonia National Park:
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7841809/Hikers-claim-trips-Snowdon-ruined-cloudy-views.html

I know about the Highland Clearances they were seriously evil
and why there are so many Scots people in Canada and the US

I would love to see more and more trees planted all over the UK.

ps to my previous post - evidently some of the Scandinavians went over to the west, ie Lake District.
@ pinkquartz also the Highland Clearances, more recently:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

Nobody is talking about forcing people from ethnic groups to visit - obviously. What they are doing is looking at the demographics of the current visitors to see if they can widen access to include more younger/older/disabled/non middle class/non white people. Seems emminently sensible to me.

It's interesting that the ethnic part of the demographic has caused so much consternation on here.

Let's plant more trees in the Lake District then, they are after all the lungs of the planet.

here

Robin Milton, chairman of the NFU Uplands forum, and sheep farmer Louise MacArthur (Letters, 13 May) completely misunderstand the point George Monbiot is making (The Lake District as a world heritage site – what a disaster that would be, 10 May) in resisting the designation of the Lake District as a world heritage site. This landscape is totally artificial and manmade: it is a “sheepwrecked landscape” which could not be resurrected if designated as a world heritage site. Louise MacArthur’s “glorious fells” should, except for the highest ground, be partially forested, and would be but for the depredations of free-ranging sheep which prevent natural tree growth. Hence the relative paucity of forest in the British Isles, compared with almost all of our European neighbours. Of course, it is not all down to sheep. In the highlands of Scotland, deer are also significant players (as is heather-burning to sustain grouse). A major problem is that most Britons have no idea that the bare upland areas that dominate Scotland, much of Wales and the higher Pennines were once extensively clothed in trees. Our Neolithic stone-axe-wealding ancestors started the tree felling, a job that was completed during the industrial revolution.

Ladymuck - good point. I think, not sure, there was a big population drift from Scandinavia to Scotland , many centuries ago.
From Neil Oliver's series on the Vikings.

I love, love, love the Lake District, but rarely visit these days as I now live in the south, I used to regularly visit when I lived in the north west.
People can visit or not, as they wish. There may be some things that could be done to make some areas more accessible to disabled people, although clearly there are limitations on that, and those changes could probably only be in the towns and villages as it’s not realistic to expect people with mobility difficulties for example, to be able to access the tops of steep hills.
As for different ethnicities visiting the lakes, well that I’m afraid, is up to them. If they want to visit they can, if they don’t want to, well fair enough. People can’t be forced to visit national parks just because someone else has decided they should.

Yes the landscape has been changed by sheep farming.

Changed.

Early settlers were probably dark-skinned.

They evolved to have white skin because they needed all the Vit D they could get as apparently it rains a lot in the Lake District.

I thought everyone knew that.

There were far more trees originally; Bronze Age people cleared a lot of the land of trees and moved huge boulders forming cairns.

inkycog

The feelings of the Romans who were sent to the north of England are well documented and funnily enough, they didn't find much to remind them of home. Perhaps they weren't white enough?

We stood up on Hardknott Roman camp on a sunny May day and wondered how a young Roman soldier would feel, sent there in the depths of winter, after Rome, Spain or Africa or wherever they came from.

Maybe it was the Romans....they saw those bleak hills and thought to themselves " Ah yes Tuscany"

I'll get the wife and kids over here ASAP.

the original people who settled there did so because it reminded them of their homeland

That's fascinating! Is this documented somewhere?

I live in Cumbria but not the Lake District part, this has come up before and does so every few years. As the next round of payments are going active there is a scurry to fit all the criteria so they get maximum payments so this is nothing new, there will be a lot of adverts and some small changes to the way some operate but then it will all die down until next time.

If you want a holiday in Cumbria just stay clear of the Lake District hotspots and visit the rest of this beautiful county.

There is already a zipwire at Honister slate mine, the one the NT wanted was in a very stupid place and was rightly not allowed to go ahead, they clearly had not done their homework!