Sticky Toffee Cartmel

Visitors to the Lake District can be crudely classified into two broad types: there are the fell walkers, climbers, canoeists, sailors and other outdoor enthusiasts, and then there are the gentler souls who follow the Wordsworth trail, who haunt tea shops, go on shopping crawls and crowd onto steam trains and lake cruises. And there’s nothing wrong with either of these types…

- David Mcvey

The great thing about the Lake District is that it has room for everyone, and most locations can offer both adventure and gentle bumbling. And you can combine the two lifestyles in some surprising places.

Take the unfeasibly picturesque village of Cartmel, for example. Situated in the historic county of Lancashire (“north of the sands”), it is, first and foremost, a wonderful base for some of the more gentle leisure pursuits: low-level rural walking, admiring chocolate-box village prettiness, joining the crowds at a holiday race meeting, visiting the Priory and sampling alarming amounts of its most famous product, sticky toffee pudding.

Actually, I’ve never been to the village on a race day but I have been through it in a horsebox taking our own 14.2hh pony on other equestrian business. The approach to the village on narrow roads, the careful crossing of the square and the sharp right-angled turn towards the racecourse stables past the protruding Sticky Toffee Pudding Shop were pretty alarming even in a smallish vehicle; I can only imagine what the place is like on race days, as lines of lorry-sized boxes duel with racegoers in the village streets.

Yet, if you want to set peaceful bumbling aside, it’s also possible to escape the gentleness of Cartmel and find exercise and soaring skyscapes on a felltop less than an hour’s walk away, a fell many don’t know exists even though it does have its place in the hand-drawn beauty of Alfred Wainwright’s Outlying Fells of Lakeland.