Cockermouth. Now there’s a name to reckon with.

Enough reckoning, you’ve had your fun. We are staying in a cosy cottage just outside a village with this very name, to spend a week exploring the Lake District. Cockermouth is the birthplace of not only William Wordsworth, who shares my birth date if not the year, and his sister Dorothy, but also Fletcher Christian of Bounty fame; John Dalton, who was the first to advance a quantitative atomic theory and to establish a table of atomic weights; and Fearon Fellows. Who? Well only the Royal Astronomer to King George IV, and who mapped 300 stars the Southern skies.  What a town! Not content with being an incubator of brilliant minds, it is cute as a button. 

To visualise how charming this town is, know that it is one of only 51 towns in Great Britain designated as a ‘Gem’ town – recommended for preservation by the state as part of the national heritage because their historic buildings and planned town layouts are considered worthy of preservation.  Which typically means buildings are decaying props in a theatre of nostalgia. Not so in this town. We are happy to find local services are also preserved, and in a town of about 9,000 there are two excellent butchers, a fishmonger with fabulous produce, and a traditional greengrocer. The butchers wear white coats, like a doctor, and call me love.  We spend an enjoyable hour poking around in the “museum”, aka collection of rusty old stuff from yesteryear, in the back of J. B. Banks & Son, the ironmongers. Yes! The ironmonger.  You can see his sophisticated accounting system is as organised as the artefacts. My father would have loved this place.

But we are not here to reminisce and go misty eyed, but to take in the majesty of the scenery.  Wordsworth may have wandered lonely a cloud, but he’d be hard pressed to do so now. We’re here in September, allegedly the off season, and there’s as much chance of wandering alone as there is of encountering Wordsworth himself. It’s not exactly heaving, like Everest in climbing season, but there are plenty of holidaymakers.

Against all expectations, we have a mostly fine weather week. Not so the day we walk around Derwent Water*. We drive to Keswick, and as difficult as it is, we resist the draw of the Pencil Museum, and board the wee boat to our start point. It starts pouring down. We’re huddled in the cabin of the boat, but armed with stoicism and a stiff upper lip, several Brits sit outside. There’s nothing like a good downpour to bring out the spirit of the Blitz. It’s practically a national pastime, a badge of honour, ignoring the rain. Soldier on. Our plan differs somewhat: we identify a handy pub near where the boats lets us off. If it’s still raining, that’s us for the day. Fortunately, or not, the weather clears, and the tender peace of the day is broken only by F15s doing low level manoeuvres directly overhead.

Rather naively, we believe the Lake District to be flat. We are driving home from a lake ramble one day and the road narrows and ascends at an alarming rate. At first I think the GPS has betrayed us, but no. The concept of on-coming traffic is sphincter-tightening as there is a not insignificant drop over the edge. We console ourselves that this time at least we aren’t towing a caravan. This is country where goats are comfortable. Goats and sturdy hikers, who may be part goat. We stop at the top, and with teeth chattering remark on the magnificence of the landscape before scampering back to the shelter of the car. I’m fairly sure I saw a goat laughing at us.

• *For conflicting definitions of what constitutes a lake or a water, ask google