Dreams of escape: island adventures in the Lake District

The Lake District is rightly famed for its breathtaking waters, but its numerous small islands are also havens just waiting to be explored

The idea at first was to find a bunk hole, a hideaway, a place to weather out the pandemic – or would it be a nuclear exchange courtesy of a disgruntled Russia? Whatever the catastrophe, it was looming. I grew up watching The War Game, The Day of the Triffids, The Survivors and The Good Life. My preferred reading was Lake District author Anthony Greenbank’s Survival for Young People, along with that other Lake District author, Arthur Ransome, he of Swallows and Amazons fame, so not surprisingly this dream of offgrid escape and evasion always featured islands.

I knew I also wanted to write about childhood and Arthur Ransome and what better place to do it than on an island in the Lake District? This was joined with a real desire to find a wilderness experience in this overcrowded country. The Lake District has been a tourist magnet for 200 years. Wordsworth wrote in his 1835 guidebook: “The lakes had now become celebrated: visitors had flocked hither from all parts of England… the islands of Derwentwater and Winandermere [sic] were the first places seized upon, and were instantly defaced by the intrusion.”