Lake District
The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or (particularly as an adjective) Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes,forests and mountains (or fells), but also for its associations with the early 19th-century poetry and writings ofWilliam Wordsworth and the other Lake Poets.
The Lake District National Park includes nearly all of the Lake District, though the town of Kendal and the Lakeland Peninsulas are currently outside the park boundary.
The area, which was designated a national park on 9 May 1951 (less than a month after the first UK national park designation — the Peak District), is the most visited national park in the United Kingdom with 15.8 million annual visitors and more than 23 million annual day visits,[1]the largest of the thirteen national parks in England and Wales, and the second largest in the UK after the Cairngorms.[2] Its aim is to protect the landscape by restricting unwelcome change by industry or commerce. Most of the land in the park is in private ownership. The National Trust owns about a quarter of the total area (including some lakes and land of significant landscape value), United Utilities owns 8% and 3.9% belongs to the Lake District National Park Authority. The National Park Authority is based at offices in Kendal. It runs a visitor centre onWindermere at a former country house called Brockhole,Coniston Boating Centre and Information Centres.
The lakes and mountains combine to form impressive scenery. Farmland and settlement add aesthetic value to the natural scenery with an ecology modified by human influence for millennia and including important wildlife habitats. The Lake District has failed to be approved as a natural World Heritage Site, because of human activities, such as commercial forestry, which have adversely impacted the park's assessment. Another bid is being prepared for World Heritage Status, this time in the category of cultural landscape.As the highest ground in England, Scafell Pike naturally has a very extensive view, ranging from the Mourne Mountains in Northern Ireland to Snowdonia in Wales. The Lake District takes the form of a roughly circular upland massif deeply dissected by a broadly radial pattern of major valleys whose character is largely the product of repeatedglaciations over the last 2 million years. Most of these valleys display the U-shape cross-section characteristic of glacial origin, and often contain elongate lakes occupying sizeable bedrock hollows often with tracts of relatively flat ground at their heads. Smaller lakes known as tarns occupy glacial cirques at higher elevations. It is the abundance of both which has led to the area becoming known as the Lake District.
