13/09/2026
We’ve just got back from an amazing day exploring the sunken village of Mardale in the east of the Lake District, which got flooded in the 1930s to create Haweswater reservoir.
Every couple of years, after a long dry summer, like we’ve just had, remnants of this old world resurface. A lot of the houses were stripped and knocked down. However the lonnins (Cumbrian word for country lanes) and dry stone walls are still there to be walked along.
It was interesting finding the boundaries of old houses, even some old render of a house, particularly thinking many of the houses would have been the same as Low Nest.
It was also hard to explain to the girls that people just had to leave. There wasn’t a huge amount of say in the matter. That was the times. However we’ve still got UU on our field having had no say in them coming across it.
Normally this out of the way valley is very quiet. We expected it to be busy and while we were surprised how many cars there were there was plenty of considerate parking on the road and the actually dried lake was quite quiet. Just a note that it was VERY MUDDY!
We’ve got a bit of rain coming in now so it’ll only fill up now, but next September it could be just as dry.
We’ll do another reel tomorrow of the ground level adventure. But here is some drone footage rudimentarily clipped together with very little editing.
