People can now enjoy the stunning scenery of the Lake District from their sofa, thanks to new virtual tours from a landscape charity.
Friends of the Lake District has launched the online tours allowing people to explore its land wherever they are in the world.
It follows a pilot of High Borrowdale last year, the new tours include woodlands ranging from Ambleside to Eskdale, plus common land in the Westmorland Dales.
The tours include Mike’s Wood near Staveley, Greenbank and Sweden Woods in Ambleside, and Hows Wood in Eskdale.
The largest property covered is Little Asby Common, east of Orton, a limestone habitat which includes part of Sunbiggin Tarn and which sits within the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Farmland next door at Mazonwath has its own tour where Friends of the Lake District volunteers have been hard at work rebuilding dry stone walls, planting trees, and restoring a hay meadow.
The online 360-degree tours, created by the aerial photographer Colin Aldred, allow virtual visitors to explore these places on a home computer, VR headset or mobile, deep diving into key elements such as history, wildlife and ecology, and land management activities via short videos and image collections.
Jan Darrall, land manager at Friends of the Lake District, said: “The new tours cover a range of Friends of the Lake District’s land.
“We know that many people may not get the opportunity to visit these wonderful places in person, so we wanted to give them an alternative way to explore these spectacular landscapes and learn about our efforts in managing them.
“As you fly over these places, you can learn about the work we’ve been doing to enhance the Cumbrian landscape. This includes hay meadow restoration, creating new native woodland, restoring conifer woodlands back to native oak and birch woods, and even revealing the history of a Victorian extended garden.”
The charity is also installing digital information points around some of its properties, enabling visitors to access content via their phones on visits to the land.
Jan added: “We’re so proud of what we’ve achieved on our land, and we are delighted that we now have new ways of sharing this with people. We’ll be launching even more virtual tours next year.
“Of course, we still want to encourage people to pay a visit in person to these wonderful places and we have dedicated our land as open access in perpetuity, so anyone can enjoy it at any time long into the future.”
All the virtual tours currently available can be found on the Friends of the Lake District website at www.friendsofthelakedistrict.org.uk/virtual-tours
