Wastwater, England

I once brought up Port Isaac and how fantastical it was. I also brought up how it was one of the random pictures that show up on my Windows 10 lock screen. Welp, here’s another.

This is the picture that got me to do a search on the place.

Click it for a bigger pic.

This beautiful bastard is the deepest lake in England. Known as Wastwater, or Wast Water, it is, according to Wikipedia, “one of the finest examples of a glacially ‘over-deepened’ valley.” Well that’s nice.

The lake itself is three miles long and a third of a mile wide, and it is 258 feet deep. BUT GET THIS! The surface of the lake is around 200 feet above sea level, but the bottom of the lake is about 50 feet BELOW sea level. Hell yeah. I bet Nessie’s younger, more attractive sister, lives here. Wastie? Nessie 2? Margaret Hogg?

Those mountains around the lake there are some of the tallest in England. So you have both the tallest and deepest points in the same place. How convenient is that?

They started pumping water from the lake during WWII, most likely to keep the towers cool at the Sellafield nuclear facility nearby. They’re allowed to extract a max of 4 million gallons of water a day. I mean really, anything over that would seem like a bit much, wouldn’t it?

Probably the coolest (and a bit strange) thing about the lake is, back in the late 90s three divers died while attempting to find a “gnome garden,” a bunch of garden gnomes enclosed by a picket fence, that someone had put down there for some reason. The police went and extracted the garden, but reports started coming in a short while later that someone had replaced them, only they had done so just a bit deeper than the last garden, which was also just a bit deeper than the police were allowed to dive, so nobody knows for sure if there is actually a new gnome garden or not.

Looks like a cool place to visit. I’d love to do some fishing there, but things can probably grow very large in 258 feet of water. I don’t know if I could manage that. Also, a few people have died in those waters over the years. I’d hate to go fishing and catch a person.