Original subtitles

Right across our planet, there is an incredible variety of astonishing

landscapes.

One of the most beautiful anywhere in the world is the Lake District.

A landscape of astonishing contrast.

The lakes are a pretty incredible landscape, even on days like today.

Well, it's character building, but it's also beautiful.

Areas miraculously untouched by mankind.

Boredale is renowned for being the wettest place in England.

These are Britain's rainforests.

And England's greatest lakes.

You just feel like you just knew the water.

It's really magical.

We're going to take you on a journey through a truly inspirational landscape

admire its wonders and discover its secrets.

Our journey begins 450 million years ago when volcanoes erupted from beneath the

surface of the Earth with incredible force, releasing enormous volumes of

and ash.

When the lava cooled, it formed the super hard weather resistant rocks that

stand at the center of the Lake District.

Seen from space, you can make out the area of brown volcanic rock that forced

its way up through the earth in distant time.

These great mountains are a mecca for climbers.

And England's third highest peak, Helvellyn, is an iconic destination.

The knife -thin ridge that leads to its peak is called Striding Edge.

Its sheer sides and rough terrain make it a precarious route for hikers on the

way to the summit.

Any slip could be extremely perilous.

A quarter of a million climbers come to Helvellyn every year, and they come all

year round.

But the wrong weather could make this climb deadly.

In winter, there is only one way to find out for sure what conditions are really

like at the summit.

Someone has to climb up and see for themselves.

Zach Poulton is part of a small group of people with this vital daily task.

I'm one of the felt -top assessors.

It's a safety rail that's been running for about 30 -odd years.

We go climb Helvellyn or one of the other high Lakeland peaks every day

throughout the winter.

We take weather observations, we write a description of what's on the ground, of

the snow cover, and we're a resource really for people so they can climb

sensibly.

Helvellyn, a big sort of whaleback of a mountain on the west side from

Thirlmere, a sort of very rounded mountain from that side.

But around on this east side, there's a whole series of deeply cut corries from

the last Ice Age. But the glaciers would have been flowing down this valley,

carving it out, down the length of Oldswater and ending up somewhere near

Carlisle. And that's left us with this amazing playground.

It's the combination of hard volcanic rock and the impact of those monstrously

sized glaciers, gouging and eroding the mountains.

that's created these beautiful jagged forms.

If you cast your gaze downwards from Helvellyn, one glacier has sculpted a

perfect natural amphitheatre around Red Tarn.

The lakes is a pretty incredible landscape.

Even on days like today, it's character building but it's also beautiful

with the wind sweeping through, the rain sweeping through and a fair bit of snow

left.

I'm going to head up onto Striding Edge, onto the Knife Edge Ridge that leads

all the way to the summit of Helvellyn.

I suspect it'll be quite windy up there and it'll give me a really good idea of

how much of the winter is remaining.

and what conditions are like for people who want to tackle it.

The weather forecast is looking a bit better over the next couple of days.

I suspect people will be out.

And so I'll try and create a really good narrative about what conditions are

like so they can make sensible decisions.

Winter just changes it totally.

What in summer was a relatively easy scramble becomes a full -on

trip.

And it does rely on every sort of skill in your arsenal as a winter mountaineer.

Avalanches do happen.

I suspect with the storm we've got today, I may see some activity.

Snow overhangs that form sort of on the lee slope, in this case on the east bay.

I suspect they will be slumping today and dropping off.

It's not the highest peak, but the way it's formed and the direction it faces

means it collects a lot of the snow that comes in from the west.

It can become sheet ice, on which, you know, a simple slip can have real tragic

consequences. So it's a really important part of the safety message.

And hopefully just us being up here, spreading the word, can prevent the

mountain rescue having to go out.

So from six to seven degrees in the valley.

Trampons and ice acts as essential, really, to get up here.

Moving up the final steep slopes.

I suspect once I stick my head over the top, I'm going to get blasted.

Let me slide now. I'm going to end up back down near Red Tarn, I suspect.

Zach. can only take his weather measurements once he's reached the very

of Helvellyn.

The descent can be even more perilous than getting up there.

There was that time on the plateau where it was really howling.

Temperatures just about freezing, perfect conditions for hypothermia.

All felt a little bit real and a little bit challenging.

My face is soaring slowly from the wind, but yeah, the smile will start to grow.

And yeah, looking forward to a cup of coffee.

Helvenin's extreme winter weather not only makes for treacherous climbing, it

makes a very tough environment for wildlife.

But on this eastern slope... A few plants are perfectly adapted to thrive

amongst the snow, like the alpine lady's mantle and the rare

purple saxifrage.

It's one of the few optic alpine plants left in Britain and a remnant of the

last ice age.

It will survive the winter snow and bloom in early spring with the snow

melting.

Helvellyn is one of the last remaining strongholds for these plants.

Away from ancient volcanic rock and onto ancient seabed, over just a few miles,

the landscape undergoes a transformation.

As we travel north from Helvellyn, volcanic rock gives way to slate and the

landscape becomes much smoother as we reach the mountain of Skidor.

Seen from above, Skiddaw is more like a giant cushion than a jagged spike.

This is a gentle giant, but at nearly a thousand metres tall, it's England's

sixth highest mountain.

You don't climb up Skiddaw, you walk up.

It takes just three and a half hours of fairly gentle climbing.

This is the mountain for those of us who want to scale a great peak without

risking life and limb.

During the Victorian era, tourists were even taken to the summit on ponies.

It doesn't matter how you get here.

At the summit of any of these great mountains, you can experience a

best described by the great Lake District writer, Alfred Wainwright.

On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously wrought

The hills have a power to soothe and heal which is their very own.

No man ever sat alone on the top of a hill and planned a murder or a robbery,

and no man ever came down from the hills without feeling in some way refreshed,

and the better for his experience.

Our journey through the Lake District is taking us from up in the mountains down

towards its famous lakes.

Magical places that once you see them will always drag you back, whoever you

are.

Former President Bill Clinton came here when he was courting his future wife,

Hillary, and chose the lakeside to propose to her.

Another president, Barack Obama.

returned here no fewer than four times before he took on the world's biggest

job.

The contours of these great lakes were carved out by glaciers of incredible

and force advancing down from the mountains.

Then, when the ice thawed, meltwater gushed into the spaces left behind by

glaciers.

Seen from above, the 16 lakes form a distinct pattern, like the spokes of a

wheel around the hard volcanic mountains at the hub.

Every lake has its supporters, but for many, one stands out as the most

exquisite.

Ullswater.

It stretches for nine miles, which makes it two -thirds the length of Manhattan.

To reach the bottom, you'd have to dive down 62 metres, where the pressure

becomes so great that it's a severe risk for divers.

Most lakes in the Lake District are remarkably straight.

But Ullswater zigzags wildly halfway along its length, following a

fracture deep below the surface.

To an observer from space, Ullswater looks a little like the outline of the

wings of an eagle.

On Ullswater's shores in spring, you come across a sudden burst of colour.

Daffodils.

These wild daffodils, which often grow in ancient woodland, are probably native

to Britain.

Though the Romans, who believed they had healing properties, also imported

daffodils to these shores.

We do know that daffodils were flourishing in this spot when the poet

Wordsworth was a young man.

Walking around Oldswater in 1802, Wordsworth experienced a transcendent

when he spied these same flowers.

I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o 'er vales and hills, when all

at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils, beside the lake,

beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude, and then my

heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.

Wordsworth described the lakes simply as the loveliest spot that man hath found.

Close by is the subject of another Wordsworth poem, The Waterfalls

at Eyreforth, which fall at the boundary between two ancient layers of rock.

Eyreforth is not just about looking.

but listening.

Ira Force is home to one of the last remaining sanctuaries of a lost

of the English landscape, the red squirrel.

It has been forced out elsewhere by its more aggressive North American grey

cousins.

But the numerous spruce, fir and cedar at Iraforce allow the red squirrels to

thrive.

As the seeds of these trees are too small for the bulkier graze to survive

So Iraforce has become a little haven for the native reds.

A little to the west is one of the Lake District's best -kept secrets, the

valley area of Borrowdale, which includes, as

Alfred Wainwright described it, the loveliest square mile in Lakeland.

It also contains the tiny hamlet of Seathwaite, which is officially the

place in England.

The valley is home to a patch of ancient woodland, which once covered most of

the Lake District, had it not been cleared for sheep to graze.

Conservationist April Windle, an expert in lichens and bryophytes, is working to

help preserve this patch of historic forest.

Here we are in the spectacular Borrowdale Valley.

It's certainly one of my favourite valleys in the Lake District.

From the shores of Derwent Water all the way to the summit of Scarfell Pike, you

have such a wide variety of habitats.

Borrowdale is renowned for being the wettest place in England, which is being

demonstrated right now.

These old -growth woodlands in areas with really high rainfall are what we

to as Atlantic woodland.

And these are Britain's rainforests.

It looks absolutely amazing.

You just don't get better than this, really.

It's incalculably special.

Atlantic woodlands are almost a world unto themselves.

They're so wild and really, really dramatic.

Everything you see all around us is what characterises these woodlands.

Nice, old and mature trees, vertical rock faces, boulder fields

as far as the eye can see, and just carpets of mosses covering everything.

I mean, the trees themselves are supporting so much life.

There's just so much going on, it's hard to know where to look.

The woodlands are a sanctuary for the very first type of plant life ever to

evolve, mosses and liverworts.

These primordial species came into being around the same time as the oldest

rocks of the Lake District, 500 million years ago.

I'm actually incredibly fond of this rock face right here.

I think it is just so beautiful.

You have so many different shades of green, different textures, different

shapes. And this is a classic community of mosses and liverworts

that you find in these Atlantic woodlands.

The liverworts on this rock are all of these fantastic species here.

Liverworts and mosses differ mainly because of their leaf arrangement.

So with liverworts, you tend to have this central stem where the leaves come

in pairs.

But if you compare this to the mosses, for example, so this patch here, the

moss or the shaggy moss above.

The leaves are arranged around the entirety of the stem and almost in a

think that is the main characteristic to hone your eye in for when you're

identifying these species.

Heading deeper into the valley where the trees begin to thin, the life supported

by Borrowdale is no less spectacular.

This here is a lovely little cluster of pollarded ashes.

They've each got their own quirky little ways.

They have so much life on them, you can see that even being stood back from

here. You know, those huge patches of white, the bright vivid green, the brown

leafy things that you see coming off of the trunk.

They're really stunning.

It's vital to save every single ancient species that has a chance of survival

here.

Nine months ago, April and the team worked quickly to save an extremely rare

lichen from a fallen ash.

The original tree was a tree that I really loved.

And it had about three metres squared of this lichen growing on it. It was a

really impressive population.

And it was just heartbreaking to see the tree having fallen.

We needed to do something to try and salvage the material.

Normally these lichens get eaten by slugs or snails within the first few

So the fact that they're on the tree is just excellent.

So this one has actually attached.

One of the younger lobes underneath the main lichen has formed

an attachment point on the bark.

This is exactly what I was hoping for.

But we won't know the true success of these translocations until years down

line. Fingers crossed for the future for this little lichen.

At the very end of this valley lies perhaps its greatest treasure.

Yew trees can live for 3 ,000 years.

The Celts revered them as symbols of death and resurrection.

because of their poisonous leaves and their strange ability to regrow from

fallen branches.

In this wood, three ancient yews still stand.

One of them has been dated with an astonishing result.

This is one of the famous yew trees of Borodow.

They're some of the oldest trees that we have here in the UK.

Back in 1998, a huge limb fell down from one of these yews, which provided a

really good opportunity to count the tree rings.

And the limb alone was dated at 1 ,500 years.

So God only knows how old the trunk is itself.

But the limb alone would make these yews some of the oldest trees that we have

here in the UK.

The tranquility is just amazing.

You feel so at peace with the world, I think, when you're, yeah, standing next

to a tree like this.

Any opportunity I have, I come back to this valley.

It just grabs my heart on so many levels.

Alongside the natural beauty of the Lake District, the landscape has a

fascinating human story to reveal.

Looking down from space, you might think the Lake District has always been a

barely inhabited wilderness.

But people have lived in this landscape for a very long time.

Flint tools have been discovered from as far back as 11 ,000 years ago, shortly

after the first settlers arrived in Britain.

Hidden away on a gentle hillside where three valleys meet is extraordinary

evidence of ancient life here, the Cassowrig Stone Circle.

It's one of the oldest surviving marks anywhere on this landscape.

This Neolithic monument was constructed 5 ,000 years ago.

With a great circle of enormous boulders, 38 of which remain, the

thought to weigh around 16 tons.

Archaeologist Tom Clare has studied ancient sites like this for more than 50

years.

Everybody agrees that they're gathering places or meeting places.

You can have them as ritual or religious.

You could have them as marketplaces.

You could have them as socialising places.

And perhaps probably all in combination, but not necessarily all at one time of

the year.

The actual stones are glacial erratics, which they would have collected in the

landscape and brought here.

Erratics are boulders or stones, some several tonnes, which were transported

the glaciers. And it might well be that Neolithic people recognised them as

being alien to their natural landscape and selected them for that reason.

Tom believes the stone circle they built would have been vital to the success of

the Lake District's Neolithic people as pioneering farmers.

Without a meeting place, farmers couldn't survive because they needed to

replenish livestock, they needed to buy, get new seed.

So it was absolutely, totally essential to the first farmers to be able to meet

up in places like Castlerigg.

But how do you find such an important location when you don't have a map?

The obvious way would be you would follow valleys, and the Castle Rigstone

Circle is actually not just meeting a place over three valleys.

It's also on the end of a ridge which runs into the central lake district, and

so for people coming from afar, it would be easier to find.

Archaeologists do favour at the present time the idea that Neolithic and other

prehistoric peoples used the landscape and recognised special places within it.

However, at the end of the day, they had to be practical people and, as present

-day hill farmers will tell you, you can't eat the view.

You're farming it because you can get a return from it. So, yes, it's a nice

spot. Yes, you can see perhaps the setting of the sun over particular

but at the end of the day, they were interested in making a living and

themselves and their families alive.

It was the arrival of these early farmers and their need to feed their

that sparked a profound change in the Lake District.

The landscape at that time would have been very different. The slopes of the

mountains and the valley floor would have been clothed in forest up until a

height of about 600 to 800 feet, with only the mountain tops bare and sporting

grass.

Grassland would have been very short -supplied. They would have had to find

other forms of fodder.

We do know from evidence that they were feeding animals on leaves gathered from

trees.

But probably also, and I think this was the devastator, if you like, for the

Lake District, they would have used bark as well for winter feed.

The cumulative impact of this, of the first farmers, was to denude the Lake

District and, of course, most of Britain, ultimately of its woodland

But the animals that came to dominate this place do have a place in many

people's hearts.

For the sheep of the Lake District are no ordinary sheep.

Survival on these weather -beaten mountainsides takes special qualities.

The herdwick, Britain's hardiest breed, are built to withstand the snowstorms,

torrential rain and high winds of the upper fells.

Their woolly coat provides the perfect protection.

Unlike most breeds, it has two layers.

A warm inner waistcoat and a protective hairy outer layer.

The wool won't part in strong winds and sheds water quickly in heavy rain,

helping them bear the brunt of any weather.

The herdwicks can be an extraordinary sight in the Lake District, clambering

the very top of some of the highest mountains.

The sheep are grazed on the communal land of the Fell Peaks, a long tradition

dating back to the Norman conquest.

The herdwicks are hefted, a traditional farming method where sheep graze on

unfenced open hills.

learning their farmers' territory and passing that knowledge down to their

lands.

But in the early 20th century, commercial pressure meant this ancient

faced ejection from the mountaintops.

And they were saved in part by Beatrix Potter, author of the Peter Rabbit

Potter was a huge fan of the Herdwick sheep.

She bought up no fewer than 14 farms, using royalties from her books to ensure

these sheep had space to roam.

Ancient man didn't only use these hills for sheep farming.

This was once England's military frontier.

Heading south on the Eskdale Valley, we reach Hardknott Fort.

Evidence of the lake's once strategic importance.

This Roman stronghold, dating from the 2nd century AD, stood high on a rocky

outcrop.

An imposing sight for all approaching it.

Julius Caesar had first arrived on British shores back in 55 BCE.

And by the reign of Emperor Hadrian, around 160 years later, the lakes marked

the northern boundary of the Roman Empire.

Hard Knot Fort was an ideal spot in the landscape to hold this frontier.

Situated perfectly on a small projection of Hard Knot Fell, it has unobstructed

views to defend the mountain pass on one side and the river Esk flowing on the

other.

Some experts believe the fort had a further role, surveying mining

nearby.

For just to the north is Honister, the location the Romans mined for a highly

prized commodity,

slate.

And this slate is still being carved out today.

We're heading up one of the lake's steepest roads, and a long, desolate

to reach Britain's last working slate mine.

The Westmoreland green slate found in these hills is extremely sought after.

It was even used for the roof of Buckingham Palace.

But it's right here in the Lake District that this slate has made its biggest

mark.

Miles and miles of dry stone walls that wind their way along the undulating

terrain.

The quintessential human mark on the landscape are all built

from local slate.

A man -made legacy that continues to define the Lake District.

The final leg of our journey through the Lake District will take us to its

greatest extremes.

First, we are heading towards the south of the region, where mountains flatten

into hills, but the lakes stretch out towards eternity.

Look towards the sky, and you might see an extraordinary sight.

Ten years ago, a small population of an ancient predator was reintroduced here.

The red kite, a magnificent creature with a wingspan of almost two meters.

Sightings suggest the red kite is holding its own.

The southern lake district is dominated by two great lakes.

Coniston Water in the west and Windermere in the east.

Seen from space, they look almost like two vast punctuation marks.

The calm of Coniston Water was the setting for Arthur Ransom's novel of

childhood, Swallows and Amazons.

But the lake also has a history of dangerous speed.

Coniston's calm surface and almost perfectly straight five -mile profile

the ideal location for Donald Campbell to break no fewer than four world speed

records.

Before tragically losing his life in another record attempt.

His daring spirit still survives at Coniston Water.

In recent years, a new generation of speedboats have been breaking records

A battery -powered machine recently broke the world electric water speed

on this lake.

They reached 88 miles per hour, around 200 miles per hour less than Donald

Campbell achieved 50 years earlier, but considerably quieter.

Travelling east, off to high -speed Coniston, we reach the placid Lake

Windermere.

England's largest lake and arguably the Lake District's most iconic location.

The surrounding hills are a far cry from the jagged summits just a few miles

north. Here, the bedrock is soft to slate.

Siltstone and sandstone smoothed by the elements over the millennia.

The result is a placid, deeply serene landscape.

One that attracts millions of visitors a year to Lake Windermere.

All searching perhaps for just a little of that transcendent quality that so

many great writers and artists have found in the lakes.

Not just William Wordsworth, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, John

Ruskin, and many more.

The Lake District seems to have a special connection to a sublime state of

heightened consciousness.

Shortly after sunrise, Lake Windermere's tranquility is undisturbed by visitors.

One local resident is to be found at this shore almost every morning.

We are up to Miller Ground, also known as my happy place.

Lake Windermere.

came to live in the Lake District as part of her own search for peace.

I'm going to have a little swim.

Just a little one, because wintertime you don't want to be in the water too

long.

Just going to have a nice, relaxed swim, ready for the day.

Look at that.

Got the long dev over there.

How gorgeous is that?

It's just so nice.

Just so pretty.

When you get in the water, you've got the long deals in front of you, but when

you look this way, you've got the woodlands, you know, you're just

beauty.

You just feel like it's just you with the water, you know, because when you

in, you don't have a phone, you don't have anything.

It's really magical.

Lake Windermere and the Lake District are a great deal more than just a nice

view for Winnie.

For her, the landscape is truly restorative.

I've always suffered from depression, so I find winter

times are the hardest because it's dark early and, you know, and

it's like therapy for me coming here. The landscape is...

You know, it's really important.

In life, it takes you a long time to find something that works.

And this works. You know, this has worked in so many levels.

I usually bring two hot water bottles.

Because when it comes out, your body gets cold.

I like to have a little mat for my feet.

It's a lot of faffing, but it's all worth it.

It's so special.

It's like, this is literally my happy place.

We're happy.

It really is my happy place.

Happy plans.

Yeah, I can't explain it, actually.

I just feel good.

I'm going to go home and have a hot shower.

And then I'm ready to start my day.

The final leg of our journey through the Lake District takes us from England's

largest lake to its very highest peak, Scarfell Pike.

This imposing mountain rises up 978 metres.

Different routes to the top mean that climbers and walkers alike can find

own chosen path to the summit.

where each one can become, for a moment, the highest person in England.

At its summit lies a sea of boulders, hundreds of them scattered around like

confetti, the result of the rock freezing, thawing and cracking over

thousands of years.

The views extend across the Lake District and on a clear day beyond, all

the way to the peak of Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and even Ireland.

And the mountain's peak holds a deeper significance.

After the horrors of the First World War, this summit was dedicated to the

memory of those who lost their lives.

a striking tribute to their ultimate sacrifice.

Scarfell Pike is a fitting pinnacle to the extraordinary world of the Lake

District.

Without doubt, one of the world's most beautiful landscapes.