Qualla: Wast Water

Wast Water: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit C D Uglow, CC BY-SA 2.0. The bottom of this lake is below sea level. The surface of Wast Water sits about 200 feet above the Irish Sea, but the lake bed plunges more than fifty feet below that horizon - meaning that at its deepest point, you could walk down through 258 feet of cold, dark, oligotrophic water before you reached the floor. It is the deepest lake in England. The glaciers that carved this Cumbrian valley during the last Ice Age over-deepened it spectacularly, scouring far below the surrounding terrain. What they left behind is owned by the National Trust, protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a European Special Area of Conservation, and unusually difficult to see all of even from the air.

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Image: C D Uglow | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wast Water: Valley of the Lake

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Greig, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name Wast Water is a reduced form of Was(t)dale Water - the lake belonging to Wasdale, the valley around it. The valley name comes from the Old Norse Vatnsdalr, meaning "valley of the lake." The Norse who settled this coast after AD 885 left their language across the landscap...

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Image: Ian Greig | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wast Water: The Screes

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doug Sim, CC BY-SA 4.0. The southeastern shore of Wast Water is famous for the Wastwater Screes - or, on some maps, just "The Screes." They are a sweep of scattered, jagged stone falling from the summits of Whin Rigg and Illgill Head down into the lake. Top to base, they measure roughly two thousand fee...

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Image: Doug Sim | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wast Water: The Lady in the Lake

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GkgAlf at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1976, a Cumbrian woman named Margaret Hogg was killed by her husband. He weighted her body and disposed of it in Wast Water, more than a hundred feet deep, in cold, oxygen-poor water where decay almost stops. Eight years later, divers found her. The body had been preserved lik...

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Image: GkgAlf at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wast Water: Gnomes, Divers, and Depth

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Hill, CC BY-SA 2.0. Wast Water is also a recreational dive site - the depth, the clarity and the cold draw divers from across Britain. Somewhere on the lake bed in the 1990s, someone placed a "gnome garden," complete with a picket fence, as a curiosity for divers to find at depth. It became a destin...

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Image: Andrew Hill | CC BY-SA 2.0