The Lake District is open for business despite last year’s devastating floods. Norman Wright explored the region from a one-time slate miner’s home.

Inside the former slate miner’s cottage, a log fire blazes in a hearth that is straight from the pages of Beatrix Potter. Outside, a group of ruddy-cheeked walkers clump through the tiny hamlet headed for a nearby youth hostel as snowflakes appear in the wind.

The Lake District is one of Britain’s most beautiful areas, popular with tourists in all seasons, as our drive from a bustling Keswick through Borrowdale to the cottage at the foot of the Honister Pass showed.

There are more visitors than we expected to see enjoying the scenery, majestic in its late winter/early spring garb of snow-dusted peaks and slopes. Despite the devastating Cumbrian floods only three months earlier, the Lakes are very much open for business.

Anyone taking a trip there this spring and summer will notice very little disruption and all the old favourites are provided in the usual way – that is, the views, the fresh air, the food and the friendly welcome.

It has been a remarkable reaction to the tragic floods. Most of us remember those news reports from the flooded main street of Cockermouth, which had up to 8ft of water to cope with. Now the street has another flood – scores of vans and an army of tradesmen working in virtually every shop and home to put right the damage.

Above top: Mrs Tiggy-Winkle style range, but everything else in the miner’s cottage in Seatoller is modern. Above: Restoration work is going ahead at a pace in Cockermouth

Up at the highest point of the Honister Pass, snow following the floods made life tougher than usual for the last operating slate mine left in England – the Honister Slate Mine.

At first the snow – more than knee-deep – made it impossible to get to the mine and its visitor centre and slate processing factory other than on foot. Then the freezing temperatures stopped the factory because the water supply, which is taken from within the mountain, was frozen.

In the tradition of mining at Honister, which is believed to have begun in Roman times, you can visit seven days a week in all conditions. There’s a visitor centre and shop, selling slate items, and you can buy customised items such as house names and numbers, as well as order worktops, coffee tables and even memorials.

Take a tour of the mine and you start to get a real picture of the feats of engineering and endurance that successive generations of miners achieved in this remote, beautiful, craggy site. And from a special viewing position in the factory, you can see the incredible skills and craftsmanship required to saw the huge ‘clogs’ of slate into shape and then to split them into roof-slate thickness. The Cumberland Green Slate that the mine produces is good for 300 to 400 years on a roof. Some famous roofs including Buckingham Palace, Parliament, Westminster Abbey and most of Regent Street feature the slate, formed from 450 million-years-old metamorphosed volcanic ash, and known as the hardest slate in the world.

Slate mining, however, declined in the 20th century and Honister closed in 1986. It was saved and reopened after Mark Weir took his grandfather for a helicopter ride in 1996.

Mark’s grandfather had worked at the mine along with his uncle. As they swung over the deserted site, his grandfather expressed his incredulity that the mine wasn’t working.

After that fateful flight Mark, a professional pilot and restaurateur,enquired about the mine and then bought it after a 45-minute meeting in a Manchester hotel.

As a local lad, born in Borrowdale, Mark has spent the time since then opening up production and in effect preserving the jobs and skills of local slate miners as well as turning the mine into one of the most popular tourist attractions in the area.

Visitors usually see Mark’s green helicopter parked on a pad of slate – he generally flies it to work from his home near Cockermouth.

Making the mine such an attraction is a bit of a full circle. In Victorian times it was quite a draw for the first tourists who made it up the pass in horse-drawn charabancs. At that time the miners took the slate down to the road on wooden sledges that they piloted down a steep scree slope. Tourists liked the daredevil spectacle and often tipped the miners.

A Steam launch on a misty Lake Windermere at Ambleside

In the end, the miners started to put on a bit of a show when they saw the charabancs toiling up the winding pass.

Now roads have been built which gives vehicles access to the mine. It is still a tough life as the climate is one of the wettest in the country and the winters are cold, with the factory basically a shed clad in metal sheets.

In Victorian times the miners were climbing up a precarious set of steps and ladders to reach the chambers which they were blasting inside the mountain to get the slate and to take the sledges back up. Some lived in the mine during the working week.

The mine eventually built some cottages for miners at the foot of the pass in the little hamlet of Seatoller. Mark Weir’s mum was brought up in one.

We stayed overnight at one that the mine offers as a luxury holiday cottage. That’s where the roaring range fire came in. You could easily expect to see Mrs Tiggy-Winkle finishing her laundry there, heating her goffering irons on the hearth.

Little else about the cottage would be recognised by the hedgehog washerwoman, however. The décor is modern and the technical spec of the equipment, from kitchen to bathrooms and flat-screen TVs, is five-star. Someone has worked very hard to blend modern luxury with traditional architecture, with great taste and many thoughtful touches.

If you don’t fancy troubling the kitchen’s amazing cooking potential, you can have a three-course meal prepared and left in the oven and fridge ready for when you return from a day’s walking or sightseeing. As well as the cottage, the mine has a bigger farm property for rent in another rural location – offering the same luxury.

• Tel: 017687 77230, website: www.honister-slate-mine.co.uk.

Wordsworth and Grasmere

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 and by his death in 1850 had produced some of English poetry’s greatest works and influenced future generations of poets.

Dove Cottage in Grasmere was his home from December 1799 to May 1808, the years of his supreme work as a poet. The cottage used to be an inn called the Dove and Olive, and many of the building’s distinctive features date from this time: its white-washed walls, flagstone floors and dark wood paneling. Now Dove Cottage is home to the Wordsworth Museum and Art Gallery. You can tour the cottage and museum every day from 9.30am to 5pm (4pm in winter). Dove Cottage is closed for most of January, website: www.wordsworth.org.uk.

Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter was the antithesis of the poetry-writing intellectuals but few would question her art in creating timeless children’s books with her own wonderful illustrations.

In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children’s book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Around that time she became secretly engaged to her publisher Norman Warne, but he died before the wedding could take place.

Potter began writing and illustrating children’s books full time and was able to buy Hill Top Farm, near Sawrey, Hawkshead, with the proceeds. In her forties, she married William Heelis, a local solicitor, became a sheep breeder and farmer while continuing to write and illustrate books for children. She published 23 books.

Miss Potter’s real life in the Lakes can be experienced at Hill Top, tel: 015394 36269, website: www.nationaltrust.org. uk . The house remains exactly as Beatrix left it. Each room contains something that appeared in her books. She valued the house and its contents highly and when she died she left Hill Top to the National Trust, to open it to the public, on the condition it was kept with all her belongings in place. The house has been open to visitors for the last 60 years, so enthusiasts can learn more about the ‘real’ Miss Potter.

If you want to find out more about the characters she invented and the fascinating story of how she made the Lake District her home, the World of Beatrix Potter at Bowness-on-Windermere will provide an insight into that gentle way of life, website: www.hop-skip-jump.com .

Open for enjoyment

The Lakes are a world-famous attraction and despite the tribulations of flood and weather, they are completely open for business… and for your enjoyment.