page_title: Lake District
section_title: Physical geography
hierarchical_section_title: Lake District / Physical geography
caption_attribution_description: English: The Screes Wasdale, Cumbria.
context_page_description: The Lake District, also known as the Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous for its lakes, forests and mountains, and its associations with William Wordsworth and other Lake Poets and also with Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin. The Lake District National Park was established in 1951 and covers an area of 2,362 square kilometres. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.
  The Lake District is located completely within the council area of Cumbria, an administrative unit created in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972. However, it is historically divided between three English counties, sometimes referred to as the Lakes Counties. The three counties meet at the Three Shire Stone on Wrynose Pass in the southern fells west of Ambleside.
  All the land in England higher than 3,000 feet above sea level lies within the National Park, including Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England. It also contains the deepest and largest natural lakes in England, Wast Water and Windermere respectively.
context_section_description: The Lake District takes the form of a roughly circular upland massif deeply dissected by a broadly radial pattern of major valleys whose present character is largely the product of repeated glaciations over the last 2 million years. However the apparent radial pattern is not from a central dome, but from an axial watershed extending west–east from St Bees Head to Shap. Most of these valleys display the U-shaped cross-section characteristic of glacial origin, and often contain elongate lakes occupying sizeable bedrock hollows, with tracts of relatively flat ground at their infilled heads, or where they are divided by lateral tributaries (Buttermere-Crummock Water; Derwent Water-Bassenthwaite Lake). 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. The mountains of the Lake District are also known as the "Cumbrian Mountains", although this name is less frequently used than terms like "the Lake District" or "the Lakeland Fells". As the highest ground in England, Scafell Pike (978m/3210') naturally has a very extensive view on a clear day, ranging from the Galloway Hills of Scotland to the Mourne Mountains in Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Snowdonia in Wales.
  Many of the higher fells are rocky, while moorland predominates at lower altitudes. Vegetation cover across better drained areas includes bracken and heather, though much of the land is boggy, due to the high rainfall. Deciduous native woodland occurs on many of the steeper slopes below the tree line, but with native oak supplemented by extensive conifer plantations in many areas, particularly Grizedale Forest in the generally lower southern part of the area.  The Lake District extends to the sea to the west and south.
caption: Panorama of the Wasdale screes descending into Wastwater, the deepest lake in England.
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