Coniston village bags a glorious setting, comes with a rich mining history and has three famous people - the Victorian polymath John Ruskin, land and water speed ace Donald Campbell and writer Arthur Ransome - embedded in its historic strata. 

Ruskin spent the last 28 years of his life at Brantwood on the east side of Coniston Water and Ransome wiled away many a childhood summer in and around Nibthwaite, a few miles south of Brantwood. 

For Donald Campbell, Coniston Water was the scene of both triumph and tragedy.  He broke four world water speed records on the lake in the 1950s but was killed in 1967, in Bluebird K7, trying to set another one. The boat, recovered from the lake in 2001, will one day - it’s hoped - have a permanent home at Coniston’s Ruskin Museum. 

Across the fells to the west - you can walk over to it via the Walna Scar road - is the Duddon Valley, a place so loved by poet William Wordsworth that he wrote a series of 34 sonnets under the collective title The River Duddon.