Lake District
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
How it came to be
The Lake District is a mountainous area of North West England, and the World Heritage property covers some 2,292 square kilometres. Repeated glaciations carved its valleys and their long, narrow lakes, and the landscape has been shaped by farming with local sheep breeds such as the Herdwick, grazed on common fells. In 1724 Daniel Defoe called Westmorland the wildest, most barren and frightful country he had passed over in England or even Wales.
Towards the end of the 18th century, wars on the Continent made travel abroad difficult and visitors began to come here instead. Thomas West's A Guide to the Lakes of 1778 listed stations, viewpoints from which to enjoy the scenery. William Wordsworth, who was born in the Lake District, published his own guide in 1810, and its fifth edition of 1835 is considered definitive.
In 1895 Hardwicke Rawnsley, a vicar in the Lake District, founded the National Trust with Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter. Beatrix Potter, who bought Hill Top Farm in 1905 with income from her books and a legacy from an aunt, went on to breed Herdwick sheep, and when she died in 1943 she left the Trust more than 4,000 acres of land and sixteen farms. The area became a national park on 9 May 1951 and was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2017. The National Trust now owns about a quarter of the park.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).