Windermere is a city of approximately 2,300 inhabitants within the Lake District National Park in the county of Cumbria, in the North West of England. Windermere town center is 800 meters from Lake Windermere, England’s largest natural freshwater lake. Lake Windermere has been a summer and holiday cottage since the mid-1800s, when a railway branch gave the people of the central England city access to the beauty of the area.
The city of Windermere does not touch Lake Windermere. But it has grown alongside the lakeside town of Bowness-on-Windermere. The strange city combined preserves two distinct urban centers. Windermere Train Station continues to operate today.
While there are many cultural attractions in the Wingemere area, none can match the beauty of the natural environment. The Cumbrian Mountains surround the lake basin, in the center of which is the ten and a half mile long ribbon lake – long, narrow and deep. Ribbon lakes were formed during the last ice age and are canyons with a river at each end. A glacier would have carved a glacial depression through a vein of soft rock, creating a canyon surrounded by the hardest rock in the mountains. Boats from Bowness Docks sail around the lake. There are 18 islands in the lake, the largest of which is 40 acres and privately owned. Two other towns are along Shoe Lake, Ambleside and Lakeside. Sailing from one to the other is a great way to spend a summer day.
Since the 1950s there have been isolated reports of something strange at Lake Windermere. The story, documented by the Fortean Center for Zoology, was not widely known until 2006, when a man and wife reported seeing something large swimming about 100 feet off shore. This brought local attention to the lake, and later in the year a photographer named Linden Adams took some photos that were picked up by cable services and the cable news network. The images have never been proven to be authentic.