Wordsworth expressed similar concerns at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the paradox of popularity has been a concern ever since, but it’s particularly powerful to hear it from the people who are most affected. In the Lake District, there are a mere five bothies (bothies really being a more common Scottish phenomenon).

We get what it was like to try and hike this hill, and some of the distances, but this is about the experience when you let a place reveal something of its heart – something arguably so few people do in the Lakes. Pay in 4 is a form of credit, so consider whether you can afford the repayments as use of the product may impact your credit score.The flip side to that is that these pages are so winsome – the best beer garden in the county, the bluest fake nails on a barmaid, and so on – that (besides a bizarre liking for Bob Marley) this place could be inundated by Chesshyre fans.

This is a Lake District as lived, and not as seen on a day hike – there are trips to extinct quarries with their exhibitions of the industrial plant of the region, there are encounters with people decommissioning Sellafield.This is post Storm Desmond, which is referred to several times; it's post Brexit, and there are many references to the effect of that on the lack of employees in the tourism industry as a result; it's also post Covid and that's talked about in some of his encounters; and finally it's written after the start of the Ukraine war, and Tom has reasons why that's very personal to him.