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Walking in the Lake District National Park

By Dave Roberts   

on May 18, 2020    No ratings yet.

Walking in the Lake District National Park

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Where to go Walking in the Lake District National Park

About Walking in the Lake District National Park

The Lake District is England’s no 1 fell walking destination. While Snowdonia has the hill walking quality, the English Lake District has both quality and quantity.  Designated as the Lake District National Park in 1951 and extended in 2016 to cover an area of 2363 km2. The Lake District was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017. The Lake District is entirely within the county of Cumbria.

The Lake District National Park boasts a number of towns and villages geared up to the walker. This includes Ambleside, Keswick, Windermere, Coniston and Grasmere as well as the valley bases of Borrowdale, Wasdale, Great Langdale, Patterdale and Glenridding, Buttermere, Eskdale and wild Ennerdale. There’s good walking from them all.

Every walk seems to have a pub to hand, and a good one at that. The Lakes excel at catering for the walker, especially the thirsty ones! There’s no destination to compare with Bowness on Windermere, which has all the facilities but doesn’t have any hill walking directly from the town.

How many mountains are there in the Lake District? The hills of the Lake District are best described by using the Wainwrights, a collection of 214 summits that are included for their interest to the walker rather than height and such stuff. Alfred Wainwright featured them in his 7 volume Pictorial Guide to the Lake District fells.

Wainwright also identified 116 Outlying Fells, which we have included in the main category areas below. Click through these areas to see a full list of walks in these areas, with a full list of summits in that area to follow as well as a route to EVERY summit as we add them. If you include the Wainwright Fells (Regular and Outlying) as well as the Nuttalls and Hewitts then you get a total of 396 hills of some description in the Lake District! However, if you look at those over 600m with at least 150m drop each side (known as Marilyns) then you’re down to a modest list of 28 mountains in the Lake Distinct. Either way, the Lake District includes the only Furth Munros in England.

You can see the main walking areas as noted by Wainwright below, as well as our various Lake District Collections of themed walks.

Walking in the Lake District National Park – All the Routes and Articles