New: A Lake District Christmas

by David Felton October 23, 2021

Here at Inspired by Lakeland, three things we love are books, Christmas... and the Lake District. So working on our latest book - A Lake District Christmas: Tales & Traditions of Cumbrian Yuletides Past - has been a blast.

The germ of the idea came from our friend Alan Cleaver, well known in Lakes circles for his fabulous (and Lakeland Book of the Year '19) 'Corpse Roads of Cumbria' - a delve into the history of some of the county's enigmatic old tracks and trods. (You can hear Alan talking about Christmas traditions in our Countrystride podcast, as we walked between St Bees and Whitehaven).

Alan had compiled a book collecting Cumbrian Christmas traditions together for his friends and relatives. I loved it and thought we could expand it - bringing in folk memories, carols, recipes, archived press stories and historic diary entries - into a nostalgic journey through Cumbrian yuletides past...

So pour a mulled wine, stoke the fire and settle down with A Lake District Christmas...

In the company of authors from William Wordsworth to Hardwicke Rawnsley, Robert Anderson to Sara Hutchinson, join the carol singers of Wasdale, celebrate a Thirlmere ‘merry neet’, visit the Windermere frost fair and take a seat at the Keswick ‘old folks’ do’.

Accompany the postman on his winter round, pity inmates of the Carlisle workhouse, share the terrors of Victorian ghost-hunters, browse letters from the Christmas 1914 truce... and discover 40 words for ‘snew’.

A celebration of traditions in the historic counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, A Lake District Christmas is a variety-box miscellany of seasonal writings, memories, poems, recipes and songs.