Dreams of Escape: Island Adventures in the Lake District

Initially, the idea was to find a bunk, a hiding place, a place to resist the pandemic - or would it be a nuclear exchange courtesy of a disgruntled Russia? Whatever the catastrophe, it threatened. I grew up watching The War Game, The Day of the Triffids, The Survivors< /em >and The Good Life. My favorite read was Survival for Young People by Lake District author Anthony Greenbank, as well as that fellow Lake District author Arthur Ransome, he is known for Swallows and Amazons, so it's no surprise the off-grid dream of escapism and escapism has always featured islands.

I knew I wanted to write about the childhood and Arthur Ransome and what better place to do it than on an island in Lake Neighborhood? This was accompanied by a real desire to have a wild experience in this overcrowded country. The Lake District has been a tourist magnet for 200 years. Wordsworth wrote in his 1835 guide: "The lakes had now become famous: visitors had flocked here from all parts of England...the islands of Derwentwater and Winandermere [sic] were the first places seized and were instantly disfigured by the intrusion.

But since then the islands have become somewhat neglected. Keswick, Bowness and Ambleside might be boiling, Scafell and Helvellyn might need queuing, but the Lake District islands are mostly uninhabited (34 of the 36 I visited were like this) and almost always empty of people. I found that just getting in a canoe and taking on the water somehow got you into a weird area where you no longer felt like a tourist, and you were too, even on 'busy' lakes like Ullswater and Windermere, most certainly not part of a crowd. -type="model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.ImageBlockElement" class="dcr -5h0uf4">