Lake District
— — the green that holds the rain after it has gone.
Not only on a wall.
“A country of green fells and steel-grey water in Cumbria, the largest national park in England. Sixteen named lakes and hundreds of smaller tarns sit between hills worn round by ice. The light changes by the minute and the rain comes and goes in sheets. Wordsworth lived here, Beatrix Potter farmed here, and Herdwick sheep still graze the high pasture above the drystone walls.
Lake District, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Lake District covers about 2,362 square kilometres of Cumbria in north-west England, between Morecambe Bay and the Solway Firth. UNESCO inscribed it as a cultural landscape in 2017. The high point is Scafell Pike at 978 metres, the highest mountain in England. The valleys radiate from a central upland in a rough spoked pattern carved by Pleistocene glaciers, with Keswick, Ambleside, and Windermere as the main gateway towns and the Wasdale and Borrowdale heads holding the wildest country.
Sixteen named lakes mark the park, ranging from Windermere at about 17 kilometres long, England's longest, to Wastwater in the western valleys at 79 metres deep, the deepest in the country. Hundreds of high tarns scatter the fells. The rainfall keeps them full. Seathwaite in Borrowdale records over 3,300 millimetres a year, the wettest inhabited place in England, and the becks come down off the fells in clear brown lines after every storm.
Drystone walls climb the fells, built without mortar, some of them centuries old, dividing the high common from the in-bye land. The bedrock is Borrowdale Volcanic in the central fells and Skiddaw Slate in the north; the Honister and Burlington quarries have roofed Cumbrian cottages and London churches alike. The sheep that graze between the walls are Herdwicks, a hardy native breed protected in large part by Beatrix Potter's bequest of fourteen farms to the National Trust in 1943.