Insight Guides Great Breaks Lake District

Insight Guides

• Publisher: Insight
• ISBN:
  9781780057835
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Great Breaks Lake District is a concise, full-colour travel guide to this most romantic national park, with a selection of clearly laid-out walks and tours complemented by beautiful photography and a wealth of practical information, all in a compact package.

Overview: the book starts by highlighting the Top Ten Things to Do, from taking a boat on gleaming lakes and tarns to exploring picturesque abbeys and stone circles. This is followed by an engaging introduction on culture and landscape, lifestyle and traditions, and an overview of where to find the best food and drink.

Walks and Tours: this guide features 8 irresistible self-guided walks and tours that will take you on a journey through this poetic landscape of high green fells, clear waters and quaint villages that inspired the likes of William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter. All are clearly timed and accompanied by easy-to-follow maps plus hand-picked places to eat, drink and shop en route. Special Features home in on what makes the Lake District unique: its prestigious literary heritage, local festivals and fascinating wildlife.

Travel Tips: the final section of the book is packed with information on active pursuits, themed holidays and transport, as well as specially selected accommodation to suit all tastes and budgets, from chic boutique hotels to family-friendly B&Bs.

Tour 1 : Kendal to Windermere

This 30-mile (48km) journey takes you through the pretty landscape of the southern Lake District, from the town of Kendal to Windermere on the shores of its largest lake

Highlights

• Abbot Hall Art Gallery
• Museum of Lakeland Life
• Kendal Museum
• Kentmere
• Bowness Bay and the ‘Steamers’
• The World of Beatrix Potter
• Blackwell
• The Lyth Valley

Southeast Lakeland lacks the high drama of Central Lakeland, but its quieter hills offer many rewards, and though this tour could be done in a day, there is plenty of scope for walking and staying longer.

Kendal Castle, home of the Parrs.

iStockphoto

Kendal, the market centre for the region, is known as the ‘auld grey town’ not because it’s dull and boring, but because of the colour of limestone with which it is built. A lively place with hiking gear shops and Vacancy signs on many of its front windows, this is the main centre of the southern Lakes and provides a place from which to start your exploration.

A tranquil contrast with urban Kendal can be found in picturesque Kentmere. This valley is a cul-de-sac but hill-walkers can carry on up Kentmere Pike (2,397ft/730m) and then on to the long, straight ridge of High Street (2,719ft/829m) that once carried the Roman road between the forts at Ambleside and Penrith.

The destination on this route is Windermere, England’s largest lake. The old steamers (now running on diesel) ply the lake and take the visitor to within sight of the rock turrets of the Langdale Pikes. Bowness Bay, which the children’s author Arthur Ransome referred to as Rio, has a fascinating waterfront and the country’s finest collection of steamboats. The return to Kendal is through the Lyth Valley, back in limestone country. The limestone gives a special flavour to the fruit of a profusion of damson trees, which are white with blossom in May and laden with fruit in September and October.

Kendal Mint Cake – not actually a cake.

Apa/William Shaw

KENDAL

Kendal 1 [map] lies just outside the Lake District National Park. It is easily reached by train, changing at Oxenholme (4 mins away) on the main line between Glasgow and London.

The settlement dates back to the 8th century and owed its later prosperity to the wool trade, which transformed the town. By the 18th century there were around 150 ‘yards’, little alleys often containing workshops and named after the owners of the houses that stood at their end. Some good examples remain, with plaques explaining their history, and are worth exploring. Notice, too, in Stricklandgate a stone-built house with a protruding sign of a hog with bristles, originally made when the premises were used by a maker of brushes.

The town was the birthplace of Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr. Her family occupied Kendal Castle, now a ruin on a small hill overlooking the town.

Catherine’s prayer book is on display in the Town Hall and can be seen on request, rebuilt on a grand scale with a clock tower in 1825. An outdoor market is still held every Wednesday and Saturday around the old Market Place; there is also an indoor market here (Mon–Sat).

Kendal is perhaps best known outside the Lake District as the home of mint cake, first made here in 1869. This bar of mint-flavoured sugar, widely used by walkers and climbers for an energy boost, was famously used on the first successful ascent of Everest in 1953.

Riverside and museums

A broad, traffic-free riverside path west of the ­River Kent l eads to the Abbot Hall Art Gallery (www.abbothall.org.uk; Mon–Sat Mar–Oct 10.30am–5pm (also Sun mid-July–mid-Sept), Nov–Feb 10.30am–4pm; charge). This distinguished 18th-century building has an outstanding collection of fine art. The works are shown on a rotation basis and include pieces by John Ruskin, painters from the St Ives School, and a fine collection of canvases by the 18th-century portrait painter George Romney, who had his first studio in Kendal, and who died here. There is a particularly interesting display of landscape watercolours from the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Romantic landscape of the region captured the imagination of artists Edward Lear and J.M.W. Turner whose watercolour of Windermere can be seen here. The gallery also holds temporary exhibitions.

Abbot Hall Art Gallery has many watercolours by 18th- and 19th-century artists inspired by the Lakes, including J.M.W. Turner.

Apa/William Shaw

Kendal, a lively commercial centre, is a good base for exploring the southern Lakes.

Apa/William Shaw

Wool merchants’ endowments enriched Holy Trinity Church.

Apa/William Shaw

Beside the gallery is the Museum of Lakeland Life (www.lakelandmuseum.org.uk; Mon–Sat Mar–Oct 10.30am– 5pm, Nov–Feb 10.30am–4pm; charge). Using a series of re-created rooms, including a farmhouse kitchen and living room, the museum seeks to evoke the domestic and working lives of the people of the area before modern commu...