The Lake District is a place of superlatives for England – it’s biggest and most visited national park, it’s tallest mountain (Scafell Pike), it’s deepest lake (Wastwater), it’s largest lake by surface area (Windermere), and it’s wettest inhabited place (Seathwaite). The World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2017, is contiguous with the borders of the much older national park, which was established in 1951. If the phrase ‘national park’ gives images of untamed wilderness, think again as the Lakes have been a popular tourist destination since the 18th Century and so a significant amount of infrastructure is in place to support all these visitors. However, the number of people continues to rise ever year so in popular spots on sunny days it can become very busy and overwhelm these services. For those visiting by public transport, there are a network of bus routes that crisscross the area although some are limited to the peak period of summer. There are also regular trains to Windermere as well as occasional services along the coast on the very edge of the core zone. There is an opportunity for a double tick on the coast as the Lake District overlaps with the Frontiers of the Roman Empire at Ravenglass where there are the remains of a Roman bathhouse although a visit here would not show off the best aspects of either site.

It is difficult to give an objective assessment of the Lakes as a native Englishman. They are ingrained in our culture from childhood, growing up reading Beatrix Potter’s tales of Peter Rabbit and the Flopsy Bunnies at Hill Top Farm and Arthur Ransome’s adventure stories of the Swallows and Amazons sailing on the lakes. Poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge were so enamoured with the Lakes that it inspired large parts of their Romantic movement, including Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, arguably one of the most well-known poems in the English language. Once cultural attention had been brought to the area in the 18th Century, it has snowballed ever since and in modern times had played host to novels from Ernest Hemingway and Ian McEwan and even inspired a Taylor Swift song. This powerful cultural connection to the Lakes means that so many people now holiday there that it is causing issues such as erosion on the overused mountain footpaths, lengthy traffic congestion and lack of parking on the narrow rural roads, houses being bought up for B&Bs and second homes to the extent local people can no longer afford to live there, and all the usual littering and such that are commonplace in tourist hotspots around the world.

Just as contentious as all that is the obvious question why this landscape of natural landforms, lakes and mountains, is inscribed as a cultural site rather than mixed. This is because the current picturesque views of sheep grazing on windswept fells are anything but natural, the result of many years of humans shaping the environment to fit their livestock. Whilst these have inspired the aforementioned Romantic artists and poets, there is an argument that this is not a cultural landscape that should be preserved rather one that should be destroyed and the barren moorland returned to its pre-agricultural forest state. It would be an interesting experiment to see how much of this rewilding UNESCO would tolerate before listing the cultural landscape as being ‘In Danger’ by the advance of nature, raising all manner of questions of what parts of our heritage we should preserve and at what cost to the planet. There is no risk of that at present, however, as the enduring popularity of the Lakes with tourists from across the UK and beyond means the basis on which they were inscribed will likely persevere as it has for centuries regardless of what conservationists may say.