Peel Island is now before us, a crag standing romantically out of the water, and rich with varied foliage. From its western brink the bed of the lake runs rapidly down to a depth of more than 100 feet. The island itself was for a while known as Montague Island, from its owner. It was sometimes called the "Gridiron," for it is made up of a series of bars of rock, so to say, with a long projecting "calf rock" that stood for the handle. It might as well be called the ship, with the cockboat astern. But the old original name was Peel Island, which to a student of place-names indicated that it once was used as a fortress; and permission being asked from the agent of the owner, the Duke of Buccleugh, some little excavations were made, which revealed ancient buildings and walls, with pottery of an early mediæval type and other remains, which can be seen in the Coniston Museum. But Peel Island is such a jewel of natural beauty that antiquarian curiosity hardly justified more than the most respectful disturbance of its bluebells and heather. Below this, the shores become more indented and more picturesque; the hills around do not fall off into tameness, as at the feet of some of the lakes. On the right is the Beacon, with its cairn conspicuous at 835 feet above sea; on the left, Selside rises to 1,015 feet. Opposite is Brown How, or Brown Hall, prettily built at the water's edge; and on the long nab that stretches half-way across the lake is the old mansion of Water Park (A. P. Bridson, Esq.). The gondola slows down and rounds to the little pier, on one of the loveliest bits of all our lakeland scenery. Five minutes' walk takes you up to the Lakebank Hotel, and from its terrace--still better from the knoll above it when the surrounding trees are bare or lopped--the view embraces (beginning from the left) the Beacon, Dow Crags, the Old Man, and Weatherlam; Helvellyn, with Yewdale Crag and Raven Crag beneath; Fairfield and Scandale Head, with Loughrigg below (Red Screes and Ill Bell are not visible), and the lake's whole length with all its wooded promontories. To the right, across the water, the village of Nibthwaite, with cottages nestling under the steep and rocky mountain edge, and ruined quay which formed, before the railway tapped the traffic of Coniston, the terminus of its ancient waterway. Formerly this lake, like Derwentwater, boasted a floating island--a mass of weeds and water plants detached from the bottom, and carrying enough solid matter to make it a kind of natural raft. In the floods and storms of October, 1846, it was stranded near Nibthwaite, and remained thenceforward indistinguishable from the rest of the shore.