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 areas land of high landscape value around the Lune Valley.

Significant settlements close to the boundary of the national park include Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness, Kendal, Ulverston, Dalton-in-Furness, Whitehaven, Workington, Cockermouth, Penrith, Millom and Grange-over-Sands; each of these has important economic links with the area.

Landowners include: The Lake District is a roughly circular upland massif, deeply dissected by a broadly radial pattern of major valleys which are largely the result of repeated glaciations over the last 2 million years.

These are: The Northern Fells are a clearly defined range of hills contained within a 13 km (8 mi) diameter circle between Keswick in the southwest and Caldbeck in the northeast.

To the north stand Grasmoor, highest in the range at 852 m (2,795 ft), Grisedale Pike and the hills around the valley of Coledale, and in the far northwest is Thornthwaite Forest and Lord's Seat.

At 828 m (2,717 ft), the peak known as High Street is the highest point on a complex ridge that runs broadly north-south and overlooks the hidden valley of Haweswater to its east.

Further to the east, beyond Mardale and Longsleddale is Shap Fell, an extensive area consisting of high moorland, more rolling and Pennine in nature than the mountains to the west.

The Lake District extends to the coast of the Irish Sea from Drigg in the north to Silecroft in the south, encompassing the estuaries of the Esk and its tributaries, the Irt and the Mite.

[33] The southeastern band comprises the mudstones and wackes of the Windermere Supergroup and which includes (successively) the rocks of the Dent, Stockdale, Tranearth, Coniston, and Kendal groups.

[48] Conservationists hope the reintroduction will create a large population in the Lake District and in North West England where red kite numbers are low.

In recent years, important changes have been made to fisheries byelaws covering the northwest region of England, to help protect some of the rarest fish species.

The wet climate, with annual precipitation exceeding 4000mm in central areas, combined with acidic rock and intensive grazing, creates challenging conditions for lichen growth.

[60] Forestry has also assumed greater importance over the last century with the establishment of extensive conifer plantations around Whinlatter Pass, in Ennerdale, and at Grizedale Forest among other places.

Mining, particularly of copper, lead (often associated with quantities of silver), baryte, graphite, and slate, was historically a major Lakeland industry, mainly from the 16th to 19th centuries.

He commented on Westmorland that it was: the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even Wales itself; the west side, which borders on Cumberland, is indeed bounded by a chain of almost unpassable mountains which, in the language of the country, are called fells.Towards the end of the 18th century, the area was becoming more popular with travellers.

First published between 1955 and 1966, these books provided detailed information on 214 fells across the region, with carefully hand-drawn maps and panoramas, and also stories and asides which add to the colour of the area.

[64] Since the early 1960s, the National Park Authority has employed rangers to help cope with increasing tourism and development, the first being John Wyatt, who has since written several guide books.

Those inside the area are: The Cottage in the Wood, Allium at Askham Hall, Old Stamp House, Forest Side, heft, The Samling, and SOURCE, one of the two restaurants at the Gilpin Hotel.

Out of his long life of eighty years, sixty were spent amid its lakes and mountains, first as a schoolboy at Hawkshead, and afterward living in Grasmere (1799–1813) and Rydal Mount (1813–50).

The Lake District is mentioned in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; Elizabeth Bennet looks forward to a holiday there with her aunt and uncle and is "excessively disappointed" upon learning they cannot travel that far.

The opening of Charlotte Turner Smith's novel Ethelinde with its atmospheric description of Grasmere, complete with a Gothic abbey, is supposed to have introduced Wordsworth to it as a possible place to live.

Ambleside, or its environs, was also the place of residence both of Thomas Arnold, who spent holidays there in the last ten years of his life, and of Harriet Martineau, who built herself a house there in 1845.

These include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Hugh Clough, Henry Crabb Robinson, "Conversation" Sharp, Thomas Carlyle, John Keats, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Felicia Hemans and Gerald Massey.

Although it is unlikely she ever went there, Letitia Elizabeth Landon produced no fewer than sixteen poems on subjects within the Lake District and its surroundings, all associated with engravings within Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Books, from 1832 to 1838.

During the early 20th century, the children's author Beatrix Potter lived at Hill Top Farm; she set many of her famous Peter Rabbit books in the Lake District.

Writer and author Melvyn Bragg was brought up in the region and has used it as the setting for some of his work, such as his novel A Time to Dance, which later turned into a television drama.

The region is also a recurring theme in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novella The Torrents of Spring and features prominently in Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

The 1996 Eisner Award winning graphic novel The Tale of One Bad Rat, by Bryan Talbot, features a young girl's journey to and subsequent stay in the Lake District.

The German artist Kurt Schwitters visited the Lake District while in exile in Great Britain and moved there permanently in June 1945, remaining there for the rest of his life.

Grizedale Arts has produced many internationally significant cultural projects and has proved instrumental in the careers of several Turner Prize-winning artists, making Laure Provoust's winning installation 'Wantee' at Lawson Park, and bringing the exhibition to Coniston's Ruskin Museum in 2013.