Escape to the Lakes

Robert Twigger visits the Lake District’s most inaccessible islands

Who doesn’t have a thing about islands? From Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton via Robinson Crusoe (Defoe’s original as well as the 1960s Franco-German TV series starring Robert Hoffmann), Lord of the Flies, Mutiny on the Bounty, not to mention Tracy Island in Thunderbirds and, later, Papillon, Cast Away and even that Bear Grylls series where regular folk tried to be desert island survivors. Islands are just the best and most concentrated form that adventure can take – as long as they are small enough and uninhabited enough.

And the Lake District is full of small islands, islands that I ended up thinking about in forty years of visiting the place while never once setting foot on one. By 2021, I had done my share of Wainwrights and obscure fells, I had camped and climbed certain classic rock routes. I’d spent New Year’s Eve getting lost in a snowstorm on Sty Head pass, but I’d never swum, paddled or sailed to one of the thirty-six islands in the Lake District.

So the mission was simple: visit these thirty-six islands before it got too cold and miserable or another lockdown happened. I had in my mind a plan to camp on quite a few, which I knew even without checking was strictly verboten. Going in the summer and autumn would provide the best chance of good leaf cover; a bare winter island is a bad place to hide out on.

Which brings me to the next thing, the subtext of the whole escapade. On the surface I was travelling about admiring the many islands of the Lake District, noting birds and nature and other such fine things. But beneath the surface, in the liminal zone where the low tide of the unconscious reveals itself through the strange flotsam that it leaves on the shore, where urges are given incomplete explanations, there, I was on a mission to find a potential bolthole come the next disaster after Covid. Possibly a nuclear exchange courtesy of a misunderstanding in western Ukraine? I didn’t know.

But the unconscious knew; it knew that a deserted island in the middle of a lake, possibly full of fish, might well be a good place to hunker down while the apocalypse played out. So, on the one hand it was about a jolly jaunt around the summer isles of Cumbria, while on the other Mr Hyde was looking for a bucolic bunker to hide away in. Escape. Which I have been doing for most of my adult life in one form or another, just not from anything as potentially disastrous as a societal meltdown.

I was quite late in singling out these particular islands for special attention; Wordsworth in his excellent and still pertinent Guide to the Lakes of 1835 wrote: “The lakes had now become celebrated; visitors flocked hither from all parts of England; the fancies of some were so smitten that they became settlers; and the islands of Derwentwater and Winandermere, as they offered the strongest temptation, were the first places seized upon, and were instantly defaced by the intrusion.”

How you manage the tourists – the defacers (excluding oneself in such considerations, of course) – in your head as much as on the narrow C-roads and in the carpark, is important. In Arthur Ransome’s books they are simply redesignated “natives” and ignored, made invisible as natives were made invisible throughout the British Empire (though Arthur is in no way a conventional imperialist). It was a masterstroke that returned the Lake District to its true role: a backdrop to whatever fantasy we should choose to project upon it.

So important mission manuals or guidebooks for me would naturally include Ransome’s Lake District books for children, especially Swallows and Amazons, which is the one with the most islands in, including Wild Cat Island, the place I most wanted to visit…

When I finally got there, via some wonderful and beautiful little islands on the more remote lakes of Devoke Water and Ennerdale, as well as the burial island of Crusoe the faithful Newfoundland dog on Rydal Water, I was not sure what to expect. I assumed that Ransome had made up Wild Cat Island, and its model, Peel Island on Coniston, would be a pale imitation of its fictional counterpart. But paddling closer in my inflatable canoe (stealthier than a solid one) I glimpsed the secret harbour mentioned in the book and saw that it is even better in real life than the picture Arthur Ransome draws of it. The island itself is maybe a tad smaller than the one in the book but otherwise it is like walking into your past, into your imagination, and finding it real.

This is an extract from 36 Islands: In Search of the Hidden Wonders of the Lake District… and a Few Other Things Too by Robert Twigger, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson this week.

Robert Twigger has won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, the Somerset Maugham award and the William Hill sportsbook of the year award. He has written 12 books, both fiction and non-fiction, which have been translated into more than 20 languages. Find out more at roberttwigger.com