KESWICK MAY HAVE its Victorian villas, its town houses, its restaurants and its smatterings of culture, but it’s got a slightly ‘harder’ feel to it than its more genteel neighbours in the South Lakes. Maybe it’s those fells, Skiddaw in particular looming over the slate roofs, its bulky mass like a 931m-tall woolly mammoth. Maybe it’s the unpredictable weather (after all, Seathwaite, England’s wettest inhabited place, is just up the road) or the town’s association with historic mining in the surrounding fells. Or maybe it was just too far for those Liverpool and Manchester industrialists who built their sprawling homes on the shores of Windermere, gentrifying the landscape ‘down there’.
Nevertheless, these things are relative in the Lake District, and Keswick is still one of the area’s most picturesque and thriving hub towns. Casual strollers will enjoy
