Extreme Walkability

England’s Lake District takes one of our "make us move" criteria into new territory

Sara and I play this game where we go look at properties (houses, but vacant lots too) and imagine if this place would be the one to make us move. 

We’ve been playing this game for years, before, during, and after the set of renovations we’ve done to our home—where we’ve lived here for 25 years—renovations that have rendered it a perfectly exquisite place to live, one we often tell people we’ll never leave. But still, we wonder …

• What if we could have a view of the water?

• What if we could have a bit more distance from our neighbors? 

• What if we had a barn that Sara could use as a studio?

• What if we could find someplace a little quieter?

• Etc.

Sometime in the last few years, we decided we needed to be a bit more systematic in our thinking. What would it take to get us to move? We figured the best way to know would be to rate the places we looked at, in a variety of categories, and generate a score.¹ For that, we needed a spreadsheet.

We currently have 11 categories in our spreadsheet: Walks from Home; Walks Nearby; Distant View; Space Around; Ambient Noise (like road noise); Positive Noise (like a babbling brook); Light Exposure; Healthcare; Community Feel; Food/Services; and Proximity to Kids. (Because our spreadsheets are always a work in progress, we are constantly debating categories, weighting, and what it would take to actually cause us to move.)

Our first two categories relate to “Walkability”: how much you can walk starting from our front door, and how easy it is to get to more walks via a short drive. Our current house rates an 8 in both categories: we live “in town,” so we can walk out our house and go on an endless array of walks through the neighborhoods and parks of Snohomish, including to grocery stores, restaurants, and bars; within a short drive, we can reach a nearly endless variety of other walking, from waterfront trails to legit hikes leading to summits. 

When it comes to walking, we think we’ve got it pretty damned good. 

And that’s why we were so gobsmacked by our encounter with what may be the most walkable place on earth: England’s Lake District.

We came to visit the Lake District almost by accident: we had decided to tack on a visit to our old friends Chris and Siobhan (and their daughter Caitlin, now 19, who had come onto the scene since we saw them last). “Great,” they said when we announced our intention to visit, “We just bought a place in the Lake District and we’ve barely moved in, but let’s just stay there.” And that’s how we found ourselves, scarcely 24 hours (and precious little sleep) after leaving home, heading out from their centuries-old stone home for the first of our epic walks in the Lake District.

“You’re probably tired,” said they, “ so we’ll just do a short walk²,” and off we went, alongside a stream and through a pasture on one of those impossibly narrow English lanes, thence across a stone bridge for a quick pop-in to see Caitlin, who was working at the tea house at Rydal Mount, where famous English poet William Wordsworth spent most of his later years. Revived by a coffee and a scone served with clotted cream and jam, we then wandered through the grounds of Rydal Hall and down another narrow single-track skirting pastures until we came to Chris’s favorite pub, the Golden Rule, in Ambleside. Sara and I were by this point somewhere out past tired, so far out of sync with the clock that we didn’t know what time it was, and so we happily consented to two pints before we walked home “just a mile.” By 8 pm we sat down to dinner at their house, 6 miles of walking to our credit. And that was just the start.

Fresh off the plane, we start our first walk

Within moments, we’re here!

Looks like we’ve about finished the first pint

The next day, the real walking commenced, inspired by a quick thumb through one of Alfred Wainwright’s famous guides to the walks of the Lake District. Through the pasture, turn left, through the woods toward Rydal Water (a small lake) and then up, up, up, winding through the ubiquitous waist-high bracken, weaving along and sometimes over the stone walls, up to some “fell” or another, the Stonechats and Eurasian Skylarks providing the musical accompaniment. Eventually we’d ascended some 2,000 feet and could look across the countryside and see higher mountains in the distance, lakes and small villages set in the valley below.

Chris consulted a map regularly, because every 100 yards or so there was a choice to make, a trail leading off this way or that way. We’d stop and Chris and Siobhan would dually narrate, “Well, you could head off that way and down toward such and such a place …,” “There’s a nice pub there, isn’t there?” “Oh yes, very good, or if we were really ambitious we could add on several more miles and go off over to that ridge, then down into such and such another place, which also has a nice pub …” “But that’s such a long walk back.” What quickly became clear to Sara and me was that you could walk in nearly any direction, taking a number of different routes, and every way you turned would take you eventually to a pub or a hotel or, if you like, home.

A well-earned beer (and cider) at Tweedies

We chose to walk that way, off to Grasmere, and not just to try the famous gingerbread, noted Siobhan, but because Tweedies really was one of the nicest pubs in the region. And so it was! Nice enough to tide us over for the “short” walk back home, just another couple miles, and we’d be home in time enough to tidy up and walk another mile back up to the Badger Bar for a proper pub dinner. By the end of the day, we’d clocked 12 miles.

We did manage an excursion to Sycamore Gap in the north

And so it went, for two more days. I’ll spare you the details (some of which are captured in the pictures) and let’s zip straight to the conclusion. What we’d discovered here, Sara and I reflected as we sat in the Manchester airport, off for the next leg of our adventure, was a kind of walkability that we had never even imagined. Directly from their front door, our friends had an unlimited choice of walks in nearly any direction, with elevation gain and views, solitude and beauty, but also the chance to stop by the grocery store or the pub, as you chose. It was a walker’s utopia.

They assured us it wasn’t heaven: we were there on the best of days, after all, with pleasant weather and without the throngs of tourists that clog up the place on the summer weekends.  And for us, it didn’t even qualify for the spreadsheet: it utterly failed in the “proximity to kids” category. But the Lake District set a new target for walkability … one that I’m not sure we could match in the United States. 

How about you? Do you know of a place that boasts this level of walkability? The comments section is as good a place as any to share it.

1. You may say to yourself, why would you go to the bother when realty websites already do that for you … but I’ll tell you I looked into one element of that racket, called WalkScore, and it’s like every other commercial rating system you’ve ever seen: it’s set up solely to make money for people selling you the shallowest, least interesting version of whatever is being sold. I’ll use my spreadsheet, thanks.

2. Which is, I think, any walk under 8 miles. Walks above 8 miles seem to be “proper walks.” But who am I to say, I was only there 4 days.