Coniston Water

I came to Coniston because of a children’s book. Swallows and Amazons — Arthur Ransome’s 1930 novel about children sailing and camping on a lake in Cumbria — is set transparently on Coniston Water, with Wild Cat Island clearly based on Peel Island at the southern end of the lake. I read the book as a child in France and it planted something — a very English fantasy of grey water and sailing dinghies and independence — that I was still carrying at thirty-four when I finally came to look for the original. Peel Island from the water, with its wooded promontories and hidden bays, looks exactly as Ransome drew it. Some things survive the collision with reality intact.

The town of Coniston sits at the northern end of the lake, in the shadow of the Old Man of Coniston — a proper mountain at 803 metres, the great rocky mass that dominates the western skyline. The town itself is quiet in a way that feels earned rather than merely neglected: it has two good pubs, a handful of B&Bs, a National Trust property, and a boat hire operation on the lake shore. The Black Bull Inn has been brewing its own Bluebird Bitter since the 1970s, named after Donald Campbell’s jet-powered boat, and the bitter is good — full and malty and the colour of dark toffee. I drank a pint of it looking at the photograph on the wall of Campbell’s boat, which broke up on this lake in 1967 during an attempt to set a world water speed record. He was killed instantly. Campbell’s Bluebird was recovered from the lake bed in 2001 and is being restored.

The Steam Yacht Gondola is the most improbable transport in the Lake District. Originally launched in 1859 as a passenger vessel, it was left to rot in the 1930s, salvaged by the National Trust in the 1970s, fully restored, and now operates as a scheduled service on the lake. It runs on steam, burns coke, and moves across the water with a peculiar gliding quietness that the Victorian engineers clearly intended to be elegant. Sitting on the upholstered benches in the saloon while the steam engine turns somewhere below and the Old Man of Coniston passes at stern feels genuinely, unironically good.

Brantwood, the house where John Ruskin lived from 1872 to 1900, looks across the eastern shore toward Coniston. Ruskin was the great Victorian art critic — the man who defined what constituted beauty in art and architecture for a generation, who argued passionately against industrial ugliness, who taught drawing to working-class people, and who had a series of mental crises that his biographers have been debating ever since. The house reflects all of this: extraordinary views through the drawing room windows, a garden he designed on the fellside that is still managed with obsessive care, collections of drawings and geological specimens and manuscripts. I went on a Tuesday and had most of the house to myself.

The walk along the eastern shore is six miles from Coniston town to Brantwood and back, mostly through ancient lakeshore oak woodland. In October the oaks are still carrying their leaves — British oaks turn late — and the light through the canopy is the specific warm gold that happens when autumn sun hits deciduous woodland at low angle. I stopped four or five times to photograph reflections in the lake and then felt embarrassed about it, and then stopped feeling embarrassed, because there was nobody there to be embarrassed in front of.

When to go: June for the long sailing evenings when the Gondola operates its evening cruise and the light on the Old Man of Coniston stays until nine. October for the woodland paths. The lake freezes rarely but memorably — locals skate on it when it does, which happens perhaps once a decade.