January made an auspicious start to the new year for Hidden Lakeland, with the launch of an exciting new partnership with English Lakes Hotels, for whom I’m now offering tailored tours for Japanese visitors direct from their website.
You can read more about the partnership with English Lakes in a press release featured in the Westmorland Gazette, a newspaper “not quite as old as the hills” as the Gazette quips, but with a reputation that is just as solid, serving the Lake District and its surrounding communities since 1818. The photo accompanying the press release has me standing in front of the lovely Low Wood Bay Hotel with Colin Fox, Manager of English Lakes Hotels, beside a small cannon “kept here [at Low Wood] to gratify the curious with those remarkable reverberations of sound, which follow the report of a gun…in these singular vales” (Thomas West, Guide to the Lakes 1778). The cannon is a relic of a strange and rowdy entertainment much favoured by early travelers to the Lake District, who liked to get out into the valleys and make some noise – eager to hear the sound of cannon shot or gun-fire relayed back to them in echoes.
Personally, I prefer more tranquil ways to enjoy the Lakes, but posing with the cannon at Low Wood did afford the perfect shot (pardon the pun) of Windermere, seen here in perfect sunshine just minutes after a blanket of early morning mist had lifted from the lake. How lucky we were to get a photograph that shows off the Lake District so well for January. It could only be a good omen!
