The English Lake District is a place of extraordinarily concentrated beauty and yet one which can take an entire lifetime to explore. People laugh - I did at first - when its devotees claim that it outranks the Alps or even the Himalayas for mountain scenery. But once you take its winding paths through forgotten valleys past lost tarns, watched by red squirrels and if you are lucky, a pine marten or golden eagle, you soon understand.

This is not a landscape where mountains soar to heights accessible only by cable-cars or where you need teams of porters to cart your supplies to base camp. You can leave your B&B - or five star gourmet restaurant - on foot and within minutes be lost in the glorious surroundings that bewitched Wordsworth and Coleridge. Once hooked, you can return again and again for further explorations. The national park looks small on the map, but like Dr Who's Tardis, turns out to be huge: valley after valley, lake after lake.

I go there to walk (and drink and eat) but the lakes are also the backdrop for family fun - boating, steam trains and the world of Beatrix Potter. One museum commemorates the speed ace Donald Campbell who died on Lake Consiton; another tells you about the great flying boat repair works which mushroomed on Windermere during the Second World War. There's a coast too; some of Britain's quietest treasures are strung along the Irish Sea from Carlisle round to Morecambe Bay. And while the 'old grey town' of Kendal, the gateway to the Lake District, has an art gallery which ranks with London's, you can have a mini-West End night out in Keswick at the renowned Theatre by the Lake.