Journal Lake District
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There is a particular moment in June on the afternoon tours that I have come to look for deliberately. We return from the Kirkstone Pass descent around 4.30pm — the light at this hour in June is still high and strong, nothing like the late afternoon quality you might expect — and as we drop toward Brothers Water the Hartsop valley opens to the right with the beck catching the sun and the fells absolutely clear above it.
Guests who came expecting a summer afternoon find themselves in something that looks more like a long midsummer morning. The light, the clarity, the green. June consistently surprises people who associate the Lakes with autumn or spring and have underestimated what the long days produce.
The obvious change is the light — seventeen hours of it at the solstice, with the quality at 5pm closer to what you'd expect at noon in October. But the less obvious change is the fullness of the landscape. The fells in June are completely dressed: no bare ground visible on the lower slopes, the bracken at full height, the oak woodland in full canopy. The landscape looks occupied in a way that winter strips back to reveal.
The sounds change too. Swifts over every Lakeland village from late May, screaming in the evenings above the rooftops. Swallows over the lakes. Cuckoos on the open fell in early June — fewer each year, but still present in the upper Borrowdale and the Newlands valley. The whole landscape is operating at its most active and most audible.
June guests arriving for the first time — particularly those who have been told that autumn is the best season and have overridden that advice — are often quietly triumphant by the end of the tour. The guide told me October was better, one guest said on the drive back to Windermere last year. I think I may have been right to ignore the guide.
She was not right, exactly — October is still the finest month for the specific combination of colour and light and atmosphere that makes the Lake District landscape at its most distinctive. But June makes an honest case for itself, and it makes it in terms that are different rather than inferior.
The Wordsworth tours are particularly good in June. Dove Cottage garden in late June, with the roses at their height and the low oak woodland on the hillside above it fully in leaf, is the garden as Wordsworth knew it — Dorothy's cultivation of it was most visible in summer, and it is summer in the journals and letters more than any other season that produces the specific quality of life the Wordsworths lived.
The week around the solstice — roughly 18 to 24 June — is when June is most clearly itself. The days are at their longest; the fells catch light until past 9pm; the evenings on any Lakeland shore are remarkable.
We sometimes finish the afternoon tour at 6pm and guests ask whether there is somewhere good to watch the sunset. The answer in June is: almost anywhere you can see the western sky. The sun sets over the Irish Sea, and the light it leaves on the western fells — the Borrowdale fells, the Coniston Old Man, the Langdale Pikes — as it drops toward the horizon in the northwest at nearly 10pm is the Lake District doing something it can only do in this month, at this latitude, in this light.
Worth staying for.