Lake District

The Lake District, also known as the Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous for its lakes, forests and mountains (or fells), and its associations with William Wordsworth and other Lake Poets and also with Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin. The Lake District National Park was established in 1951 and covers an area of 2,362 square kilometres.[1] It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.

The Lake District is located completely within Cumbria, a county and administrative unit created in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972. However, it is historically divided between three English counties (Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire), sometimes referred to as the Lakes Counties. The three counties meet at the Three Shire Stone on Wrynose Pass in the southern fells west of Ambleside.

All the land in England higher than 3,000 feet (914 m) above sea level lies within the National Park, including Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England.[4] It also contains the deepest and largest natural lakes in England, Wast Water and Windermere respectively.

The Lake District National Park includes all of the central Lake District, though the town of Kendal, some coastal areas, and the Lakeland Peninsulas are outside the park boundary.

The area was designated a national park on 9 May 1951. It retained its original boundaries until 2016 when it was extended by 3% in the direction of the Yorkshire Dales National Park to incorporate areas such as land of high landscape value in the Lune Valley.

It is the most visited national park in the United Kingdom with 15.8 million annual visitors and more than 23 million annual day visits,[8] the largest of the thirteen national parks in England and Wales, and the second largest in the UK after the Cairngorms National Park.

The precise extent of the Lake District was not defined traditionally, but is slightly larger than that of the National Park, the total area of which is about 912 square miles (2,362 km2). The park extends just over 32 miles (51 km) from east to west and nearly 40 miles (64 km) from north to south, with areas such as the Lake District Peninsulas to the south lying outside the National Park.