Walking Lakeland Tarns Vol I West - English Lake District, UK

• Location
• Description
• Contents
• Introduction
• Sample Route
• Maps

In the warmth of a spring morning, with May blossom covering the trees and wild violets blooming in the hedgerows, we climbed from Coniston into the hills on the first of our expeditions to the tarns of Lakeland. There were to be many more, for scattered across the Lake District are hundreds of tarns together with innumerable small pools, and even after many years of walking the fells there was still so much new to discover…

Selection of the Tarns

‘Baysbrown Tarn is not a tarn’ said the owner when we asked his permission for a visit, ‘It is a duck pond’. A tarn, says our dictionary, is a small mountain lake and the word comes from the Old Norse word tjorn. The Freshwater Biological Association, taking a more scientific approach, defines it as one in which the chief plant is the bottle sedge, whereas in a lake it is the common reed. Yet science comes a long way behind Wordsworth’s description of Blea Tarn ‘A liquid pool that glittered in the sun’. But what exactly is a tarn? How were we to select from the innumerable patches of blue scattered across the map?

There were plenty of suggested rules: a tarn should be natural, it should have a permanent outflow, not dry up in the summer; it shouldn’t be too shallow and it should have a name. Well, if tarns had to meet all those stringent qualifications, then many of the loveliest tarns in the Lake District would be eliminated. Tarn Hows isn’t natural, Blind Tarn hasn’t got an outflow, Beck Head Tarn dries up, and Foxes Tarn is only a few inches deep, and while some tarns have three or more names, others have none at all.

It is impossible to be precise about it and any selection is bound to be a personal one, for when seen in sparkling sunlight under a blue sky even the merest puddle can look enchanting. In the end we have included all the tarns named on the Ordnance Survey maps which come within the boundary of the Lake District National Park. To these we have added all those commonly accepted as tarns, though not named on the maps, and finally we have included those which because of their size or situation could not be ignored.