ABSTRACT
In 1769, while gathering material for his Six Months Tour through the North of England, Arthur Young approached Windermere from Kendal, and hiring a boat from the innkeeper at Bowness was rowed out to sample ‘the extreme beauty of the lake’ – particularly the situation of the largest island on it. ‘The Island’, Young observes,
contains between thirty and forty acres of land, and I cannot but think it the sweetest spot, and full of the greatest capabilities, of any forty acres in the king’s dominions. The view from the south end is very fine; the lake presents a most noble sheet of water stretching away for several miles, and bounded in front by distant mountains; the shoars beautifully indented by promontories covered with wood, and jetting into the water in the most picturesque stile imaginable. 1
