Of all the better-known lakes or haunts in Lakeland, this one is perhaps the most secluded. A dozen miles by steep roads and some fearsome hills are made light of, it is true, by the coaches of the holiday season; but at other times the valley is cut off from the travelling world dependent on public transport, and its two or three small hostelries are then apt to become very empty havens of peace amid the hills. Lying amid bosky knolls upon the half-mile meadowy interval, through which the Cocker sparkles from the foot of Buttermere to the head of Crummock, with the steep green wall of mountain, cloven here and there by the white trail of falling streams, rising sharply for two thousand feet above it, the pose of this little group of cottages and homesteads scattered around their diminutive church is perfection itself. The sense of snug seclusion from a noisy and ever noisier world, and that, too, in a spot familiar by name at least wherever the English language obtains, is everywhere eloquent, and holds one's fancy above the common. And along the steep western shore of Buttermere itself, following a sheep track on the rough mountain side, amid the scent of thyme and freshly blooming gorse, the hum of bees, with the flowers of the upland showing their shy heads among the ragged moorland grasses, what a picture at such time as I have in mind is this mile and a half of limpid water, fringed upon its farther shore by mantling woods! For though only one residence of any kind trenches upon the margin of either lake, this one of Hasness upon Buttermere has been enfolded by time and taste in groves of larch and beech and sycamore that extend half along the lake shore, and flaunt their earliest foliage of summer upon the glassy water. While on the rugged oaks mingled among them, self-sown, perhaps, some of them by hardy stunted forbears, there still flares that golden tint in which its bursting leaf so curiously forestalls the radiant decay of Autumn. And when the woods cease, what delightful natural lawns of crisp turf sweep in little curving bays to the mere edge, where gently shelving beaches of silvery gravel dip into the shallow waters, and show far out into the lake their clean white bottom beneath its crystal depths! At the head of the lake the Cocker comes prattling down through the meadows of Gatesgarth, a typical mountain sheep farm, whose Herdwicks, running to many thousands, count every mountain within sight as their own traditional domain, to the summit of Honister and the Haystacks--a noble pair of sentinels closing the gateway to the vale.