Miniature Lake District cottages at the Lakeland Model Village. Credits- lakelandmodelvillage.co.uk
A retired Cumbria builder spent nearly 30 years building a miniature representation of the Lake District , using slate almost exclusively from the local area. Some pastimes remain modest. Others gradually gain control of a garden, then a reputation, and ultimately require a brand-new house. A retired builder, Robinson, in the Lake District town of Flookburgh worked on a project for thirty years that developed from a hobby into a legitimate tourist destination. When the project’s initial location eventually closed, it had to be meticulously dismantled and reconstructed somewhere else. Each building might take up to six months to construct, pieced together from the same stone as the real farmhouses and cottages strewn throughout the surrounding fells. As the attraction states on the Damson Dene Hotel , ‘What started as a method to fill his retirement evolved to about a hundred slate models, up to a metre high, laid out in the yard of his own home and attracting thousands of tourists a year. In its new home, the collection includes tiny replicas of some of the region’s best-known landmarks, among them the Bridge House in Ambleside, Townend Farmhouse at Troutbeck and Slaters Bridge in Little Langdale. Perhaps the most notable inclusion is a small-scale recreation of Hill Top, the seventeenth-century farmhouse near Sawrey that originally belonged to the novelist and illustrator Beatrix Potter, now cared for as one of the National Trust’s most visited literary assets. A literary garden for a literary village
The attraction is open 365 days a year and admittance tokens can be purchased at the hotel reception. Now the layout presents a little twist for the visitor: an opportunity to walk among miniature versions of structures he may later visit full-size before lunch or a swim at the hotel itself. What’s particularly striking about the story isn’t so much the size of the buildings themselves but the tenacity behind them. Thirty years of painstaking, repetitive craftsmanship, made entirely by hand from a tough local stone, could easily have ended up in a skip or a storage unit when the original site closed. Instead, thanks to Robinson’s own patience and a hotelier’s willingness to take on an unconventional project, his slate townships continue to greet visitors, just a short drive from the real landscapes they were built to imitate.