Setting
The Lakes has long been adored by visitors but this landscape is one that has been shaped over the millennia both by nature and by man…
Nature’s part is obvious in the form of Windermere, England’s longest natural lake, a classic ribbon lake, formed some 13,000 years ago during the retreat of two glaciers at the end of the last ice age, with the resulting meltwater remaining in a natural bowl in the valley bottom…
Man has too played a part in shaping this area Bowness and Windermere are no exception…
Bowness an ancient fishing village with its origins in Viking history became a thriving tourist centre almost overnight with an array of hotels and guests houses springing up… becoming the fashionable place to holiday among the middle and upper classes… Windermere on the other hand as a town didn’t exist until the advent of the railway in 1847, built in the hamlet of Applethwaite, by 1859 residents began to refer to the emerging village by the name of Windermere.
Tourism as you might imagine has played a significant part in the development of both Bowness and nearby Windermere… All of this can be directly traced back to Thomas West’s tourist guide to the Lakes (the first ever travel guide book) published in 1778.
This book proposed an alternative to ‘The Grand Tour’ on the readers own doorstep… ”To encourage the taste of visiting the lakes by furnishing the traveller with a Guide; and for that purpose, the writer has here collected and laid before him, all the select stations and points of view, noticed by those authors who have last made the tour of the lakes, verified by his own repeated observations.’’
Thus, began the notion of the picturesque and the beginning of the era of ‘true tourism’ in the Lake District…
Ryebeck like many of its fellows was originally built as a gentleman’s retreat, a fine example of a property with its feet firmly planted in the Lake District’s Arts & Crafts artistic movement and the growing desire of the monied classes to enjoy fresh air and fine views…
Nestling in five acres of gardens overlooking Windermere England’s largest lake, the distant looming bulk of the Coniston fells and historic Claife Viewing Station, this property is a celebration of all that is good about the region.