Local residents living in the Lake District National Park have complained of visitors leaving litter and leaving tents behind after illegally wild camping on the banks of lakes
Tensions are bubbling away in the Lake District(Image: Getty Images)
Wild campers and locals are going head-to-head in the UK’s best-known and most visited national park as overtourism tensions threaten to boil over.
Paths blocked by campervans. Discarded tampons and nappies. Dogs let loose on the fells. Sausages grilled in the shadow of ‘BBQs forbidden’ signs.
These are just some of the hundreds of complaints from locals fed up with what they see as unacceptable tourist behavior in the Lake District.
A great number of instances of littering, wildfires, and campers leaving equipment behind (known as fly camping) were logged in the Friends of the Lake District’s annual survey.
“Some people have no social conscience and do not care about the impact of their behaviour on the environment or other people. We see litter on the fells, on lakesides and thrown out of cars onto grass verges. We even saw someone having a BBQ sat right next to a sign prohibiting it on Ullswater last year,” one unhappy local wrote in this year’s survey.
Another added: “I’m from the Lakes and have always appreciated the tourism and what it does for the area. However, I feel we have now got to the stage where tourism is over capacity and negatively impacting the area and the quality of life for residents and animals. Frequent traffic jams, poorly parked cars, and most upsetting of all, litter. Today we came across a discarded used nappy and a tampon. My children and I frequently go out with our litter pickers. It really saddens me to see the Lake District in environmental decline.”
It is difficult to know quite how acute the problem is. The surveys collect anecdotal evidence and solid figures on littering and anti-social behaviour are hard to come by.
What is undeniable is the shifting demographic of those coming. In 2018, 52% of visitors to Cumbria were under 50. By 2022, that’d risen to 74%.
Surprisingly, overall visitor numbers were down at the last count (2024) compared to both 2023 and the pre-Covid year of 2019. Roughly five million fewer people visited in 2024 than in 2019.
Jeremy Smith is head of campaigns and engagement at Friends of the Lake District. He believes that relations between visitors and locals have been tense since the Covid years, in part due to the changing nature of the tourists coming.
“With the increase in the number of people taking holidays in the UK, in terms of behavior, what may have been happening in Ibiza and Cyprus has been domesticated in places like the Lake District,” he told the Mirror.
Local laws were tightened earlier this year in response to resident complaints. Those causing environmental damage by littering, starting fires, or committing anti-social behaviour linked to camping or the “inappropriate use” of motorhomes can now be fined up to £100, under Westmorland and Furness Council public protection orders.
Wild camping rules are a little more complex. It isn’t legally permitted without landowner consent, but is widely tolerated if strict ‘Leave No Trace’ guidelines are followed. These require visitors to camp only above the highest fell wall (around 400m+), well away from roads and towns, stay for just one night, and never light a fire.
According to some locals, the rules are being flouted regularly.
“The path by the shore had a tent pitched in the middle of it, and when I politely pointed this out to the occupants, they swore at me aggressively,” one survey respondent wrote.
“People do not like to be questioned about leaving litter, loose dogs, motorbikes, it’s a sense of entitlement to do just as they like. There are very few authority figures, such as police or wardens. It should not be up to pensioners to police the park.”