Family Experiences in the English Lakes

The 16 glacial lakes making up Lake District National Park lie in long ribbons surrounded by rolling moors, green valleys and mountains, known as fells. Families traveling there will find hiking and bike trails, a steam railway, several boat excursions, and an enigmatic stone circle that’s 5,000 years old.

Best known is Lake Windermere, which you can explore with Windermere Lake Cruises, or use their boat as a ferry to hop between lakeside towns. For a kid-pleaser, combine a cruise with a ride on a locomotive on Haverthwaite Steam Railway for an excursion into Leven Valley.

Explore the lake and River Leven in a rowboat, which you can hire at a restored old boathouse in Victorian Fell Foot Park. Picnic there while kids enjoy the playground, then stop to see the United Kingdom’s largest collection of freshwater fish at Lakes Aquarium.

Lakeside trails circle Derwentwater, and you can use them for long or short walks by hoping off Keswick Launch Co. boats and picking up another boat at a different stop. Or just enjoy riding around the lake on the one-hour circuit. In Keswick, kids won’t want to miss the Pencil Museum to learn how they are made and how nearby Seathwaite Wad Mine launched the world’s first pencil industry here in Keswick.

The mountain, known as the Old Man of Coniston, towers above Coniston Water and the village of Coniston. View it from different points from the 1859 steam yacht Gondola or rent a boat or bike from Coniston Boating Centre.

A trip to England isn’t complete without at least one ancient stone site, and Castlerigg Stone Circle is one of the best. Not only one of the oldest (dating from 3,000 B.C.), it is also one of the most atmospheric; there’s no ticket kiosk or visitor center, and your family may be the only people there. Challenge kids to match the stones to the surrounding fells — they are aligned.

Younger kids and the young at heart won’t want to miss Hill Top, the home and studio of Beatrix Potter. This 17^th-century farmhouse and its surrounding hills and forests inspired many of her books and illustrations. It was the royalties from the all-time favorite classic and her first book, Tale of Peter Rabbit, that paid for this house; it has been preserved just as it was when she lived and worked here. See her writing desk, the settings for stories, and objects she mentioned and pictured, as well as her exuberant garden of flowers, herbs and vegetables. The shop is filled with her books and gifts featuring her illustrations and characters.

Literary-minded adults may want to visit Dove Cottage in Grasmere, family home of English poet William Wordsworth, and his later home, Rydal Mount, overlooking Lake Windermere.