The title of this post may have misled some people to think that I was going to write about the recent Cumbrian floods. Not at all. This is about the lakes, and getting under their surfaces, in particular Coniston Water and Wastwater. Actually it’s all a bit light-hearted. Last night I’d just spent an entire day writing for a number of blogs and preparing photographs for them when I spotted that I had nothing for this blog today. So why not take a look at YouTube and see what might be interesting to people. There were several candidates, but eventually I plumped for something entirely different from usual, and here it is.

Plant life in coniston water

2 meters under the water at Coniston July 2009 Bailiff Wood

I can’t say that the underwater plant life of Coniston is especially exotic, but although I’m no freshwater biologist I do feel that it’s nice to see that there is life down there. As I understand it, however, Wastwater is quite different. Apparently there’s very little to be seen there … a least that used to be the case. As I wrote on my lake district web site a year or two ago, some clever guys decided to brighten up the bed of Wastwater with a collection of garden gnomes. It suddenly occurred to me that someone might have filmed it. Someone had, and put it on YouTube. So here goes:

Wastwater Gnome Garden

Well, I hope that might have entertained you. At least it’s a bit different from our normal fare

The end of last month saw the launch of a biography of Joss Naylor, the legendary Lake District fell runner from Wasdale.

He’s a man of 73 now, but in his early years was a pioneer of some of the roughest running in Britain. He once ran 72 Lake District fells inside 24 hours.  And not only in his early years!  Just four months ago, on behalf of a hospice charity, he ran 35 miles and climbed over 15,000 feet over the Buttermere peaks, and including Great Gable, Pillar, Skiddaw and Blencathra on the route.

Keith Richardson has now written a biography of Joss which tells not only of his running but also of his childhood in the bleak country above Wastwater, his life as a shepherd, and the social history of the wild country of Wasdale.  The book launch at The Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, was attended by almost 400 people

Unfortunately I can’t just now include a workable link to Amazon as they don’t currently have access to copies of the book.  Apparently a single bookshop has bought up all remaining copies from the publisher!  I do hope that it will be reprinted before long, and made more generally available.  You can, though, get Eric Robson’s recent DVD, Joss Naylor – Iron Man [2009].

I think the first time I heard of the Friends of the Lake District, or at least the first time they really hit my consciousness to any significant degree, was during their campaign to preserve Ennerdale Water and Wastwater in the late-70s and early-80s.

At that time I was visiting the area frequently as a management adviser to British Nuclear Fuels and my first awareness of the struggle over how much water could be  taken from the lakes without damaging the environment was very much conditioned by what I heard within the company – although my own work was nothing at all to do with that particular subject.  Gradually I came to realise, however, that even within BNFL there were many who had considerable sympathy with the cause of protecting the future of the lakes.  After all, most of the people employed there lived in the area and loved it.

This isn’t the place for a long article about one particular campaign.  The story was well told by Geoffrey Berry in his 1982 book, A Tale of Two Lakes: The Fight to Save Ennerdale Water and Wastwater, which is now available only secondhand but click on the link and you might well find a decent copy at Amazon.

The main reason for writing today is to flag up the 75th anniversary of this excellent campaigning organisation which has done so much to help preserve the Lake District and wider Cumbrian landscape heritage since its foundation in 1934. For more, see the Friends of the Lake District website.