Journal Lake District
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There is a particular sequence that happens several times a year on tour. We arrive at a viewpoint — somewhere well known, somewhere that earns its place on every Lake District itinerary — and before I begin to explain what guests are looking at, I find myself stooping to pick something up. A crisp packet caught in the heather. A disposable coffee cup wedged between two rocks at the viewpoint wall. A carrier bag that has blown into the bracken below the path.
I do not make much of it. I pocket whatever it is and move on. But guests notice, and they ask, and the conversation that follows is usually one of the most interesting of the day.
Surprise View above Derwentwater is one of the finest viewpoints in the Lake District — the lake appearing suddenly below as you crest the ridge, the Borrowdale fells closing the far end, the wooded islands. It is also a car park stop on the B5289, which means it receives a very high turnover of visitors who spend five to fifteen minutes there and move on. The litter reflects this. Takeaway packaging, disposable cups, the occasional glass bottle. Nothing dramatic. Just the accumulated evidence of a high-volume stopping point where the turnover is too fast for people to feel any particular connection to the place.
Ashness Bridge is similar — the famous view, the quick stop, the photograph, the departure. The bridge itself and the immediate surroundings are well managed, but the verges and the beck below accumulate debris over the season.
The high fell paths are different. The litter there is less frequent but more effortful to reach. Gel packets from trail runners. The foil wrapper of an energy bar. Occasionally something more significant — a tent left abandoned, a camping gas canister, the remains of a fire where no fire should have been. People who have walked for hours to reach a place sometimes treat it with less care than people who have walked five minutes from the car park. This is a puzzle I have not entirely resolved.
The most common response is embarrassment on behalf of whoever left it. The second most common is a question: does this happen a lot? The honest answer is that it happens constantly, at almost every beauty spot, in almost every season, and that the people who manage these landscapes — the National Trust wardens, the National Park rangers, the volunteer litter-picking groups — spend a significant proportion of their time and resource on it.
Some guests ask whether it is improving. The infrastructure has improved — more bins, better car parks, improved signage, the Countryside Code more prominently displayed. Whether behaviour has improved is harder to measure. The volume of visitors has increased, which means that even a consistent proportion of people behaving irresponsibly produces a larger absolute amount of damage.
What I know from doing these tours for several years is that the overwhelming majority of visitors are thoughtful and careful. The minority who are not leave evidence that is disproportionate to their numbers.
There is a particular irony in litter at beauty spots that I find myself explaining on tour more than almost any other subject. The person who leaves a coffee cup at Surprise View presumably came to Surprise View because they wanted to see something beautiful. The cup diminishes the thing they came to see — not only for the next visitor, but for themselves, if they looked at what they had done. The self-defeat involved in damaging a landscape in the act of enjoying it is not small. It is a fairly complete summary of a certain kind of carelessness.
The landscape does not care. It will outlast every coffee cup left on every viewpoint wall. But it will outlast them slightly less well, and slightly less beautiful, and slightly less worth the journey — and that loss is shared by everyone who comes after.
We do not lecture guests about litter on tour. We pick it up quietly when we find it and we explain what we are doing if asked. We point out the Countryside Code, the farming system, the ecological sensitivities. We make the landscape legible — so that what people are looking at is not just scenery but a place with a history and an ecology and people who work in it and care about it.
The hope is that understanding changes behaviour more durably than instruction. A person who understands what heafted Herdwick sheep are and why they matter is less likely to let their dog chase them than a person who has simply been told not to. A person who knows that the beck below the viewpoint feeds a reservoir is more likely to carry their coffee cup back to the car.
It mostly works. The Lake District is still, by any measure, one of the finest landscapes in England. We intend to do our small part to keep it that way.
Our tours explain the ecology, farming history and conservation of the Lake District landscape as we travel. If you would like to understand more about what you are seeing and how it is managed, you are exactly the kind of visitor we most enjoy having on board. See all tours.