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Lake District

mountainous region in North West England, UK

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authorityQ211778
Source-derived summary

The Lake District, also known as the Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region and national park in Cumbria, North West England. It is famous for its landscape, including its lakes, coast, and mountains, and for its literary associations with Beatrix Potter, John Ruskin, Arthur Ransome, and the Lake Poets.

The Lakeland fells, or mountains, include England's highest: Scafell Pike (978 m; 3,209 ft), Helvellyn (950 m; 3,120 ft) and Skiddaw (931 m; 3,054 ft). The region also contains sixteen major lakes. They include Windermere, which with a length of 11 miles (18 km) and an area of 5.69 square miles (14.73 km2) is the longest and largest lake in England, and Wast Water, which at 79 metres (259 ft) is the deepest lake in England.

The Lake District National Park was established in 1951, and covers an area of 2,362 km2 (912 square miles), the bulk of the region. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.

National Park

The Lake District National Park includes all of the central Lake District, though the town of Kendal, some coastal areas and the Cartmel and Furness peninsulas are located outside the park's boundary. The area was designated a national park on 9 May 1951, a month after the Peak District, the first UK national park. It retained its original boundaries until 2016, when it was extended by 3% to the east, in the direction of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, to incorporate land of high landscape value around the Lune Valley.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lake District” is mountainous region in North West England, UK. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lake, District and mountainous, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1951, 2017, 2016—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1951. For this dossier, Lake, District and mountainous is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “mountainous region in North West England, UK” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q211778. VIAF identifies the subject as 244088687. The Library of Congress control number is sh85074000. Authority coordinates are 54.500, -3.167. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 2017 and 2016.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Lake District”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Lake District primary sources, Lake District archive and Lake research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Lake District”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Lake District” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.