Daniel Defoe once described the Lake District as ‘eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any land I have passed over’.
And he didn’t finish there. He went on to tell of the ‘horror’ of the place adding, ‘all the pleasant part of England was at an end’.
Fast forward three centuries and I’m not sure what the creator of Robinson Crusoe would make of this Cumbrian hotspot, to where some 20 million visitors flock each