However, this road makes its own apologies by giving us glimpses of the lake across the meadows, and compensates for its man made faults by affording if one has time to stroll to the top a splendid view from Queen Adelaide's Hill, beneath which have been provided a car park and a rustic-tabled picnic area. If time is short, then a brief halt at the Planning Board's layby car park on Hammarbank will give one the same remarkable view; all the more so for its unexpectedness, com manding as it does, on the right day, much of the lake's northern reach, and a panoramic prospect of glorious fell country. And the newcomer need no longer guess at the names of the summits he sees on the skyline, for the Board has prepared and sited here a scenic plan on which they are all named.

From Hammarbank too we see how Lancashire compensates us for its factory chimneys, overpopulated conurbations and brassy seaside resorts, for over there to the west is the proud, if much scarred contour of Coniston Old Man, and to his right beautifully sculpted Wetherlam, from whose summit, for those with the wisdom to climb, may be seen no less than fourteen lakes and tarns. These noble fells, and many more are, at least until the planners carry out their threat to reposition county boundaries, in the safekeeping of industrial Lancashire.

Enough now of carping criticism. Let us move on towards the heart of those beckoning fells, into a part of Lakeland barely touched as yet by the twentieth century. With such media at our disposal as a limited stock of superlatives, perhaps a palette and canvas, or a lens and exposure meter, we may capture some of it. But it really needs the human eye and our own inbuilt photographic plate, the memory, to capture and retain it all. Until Beech Corner is reached, where the road rises and veers to the right, the main traffic artery of Lakeland is, from the point where it leaves Windermere town to head north,

suburban, and has relatively little to commend it. Because of this it has become, some days excepted, a fast road on which, in his haste to reach the promised land ahead, the motorist is tempted to put his foot hard down on the throttle. The exceptions are the summer weekends and the national holidays, when the nose to tail crawls commence; when impatience is rife and when a few fools with multitone horns bleating and bolton exhaust systems snarling, shoot past the long lines of cars and heavy transport, only to screech to a halt some two hundred yards further on, their vicious braking adding still more burnt rubber scars to this already much scarred tarmac. (These chaps not only risk reaching a promised land which perhaps they were not seeking, but risk taking others with them!) These conditions, on these particular days, are a part of the national malaise, and are certainly not, as some would have us believe, peculiar to Lakeland.

But, on a normal day, as the motorist slows at Beech Corner, the tameness of this road suddenly ends when, there to his left he sees, framed between old beech trees those famous twins, the Langdale Pikes, with, seemingly, a wide spread of lake at their feet.This is a viewpoint for the walker where the motorist should not stop, although he does, and parks untidily on the grass verge. His purpose would be served were another carpark, such as that at Hammarbank, provided, and should this materialize I will make no claim to have been prophetic, for the choice is so obvious.