Beautifully serene Buttermere – a photo by Peter Skillen on Our Lovely Lake District in Photos: 2027 Calendar
The following letter was published in the Whitehaven News on 24th June 2026
Dear Editor,
Calling all lovers of the Lake District.
Get your Lake District photo (with credit) featured in a beautiful calendar.
The Lake District needs your help, urgently!
Its coastal areas of Millom and Gosforth are under threat, due to plans for a massive nuclear waste dump, also known as a “Geological Disposal Facility.”
The government’s proposal is for a 50 km2 square, mine works, 1000 metres deep, so that old and new nuclear wastes can be buried and abandoned over the next 200 years.
That radioactive waste will be super-hot and potentially unstable, due to hydrogeological forces from the complex Lake District geology. The science isn’t settled, despite reassurances, and top geologists have repeatedly questioned the plans.
What can you do?
Everyone knows that the Lake District is beautiful, but these coastal areas which include some legacy industrial sites are often undersung. Just outside the National Park, they are very much still the Lake District of Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin and deserve to be cherished.
We’d like to show the world the intense and often wild and desolate beauty of the Lakeland coastal fringe, such as the views seen from the summits of Scafell and Coniston Old Man, looking towards the Irish Sea. Some of the most famous Lakeland mountains stand over the coastal plain, and it is these—and their water pressure—that increase the danger of the government’s proposals for nuclear waste burial.
All proceeds from sales will go to the only campaign in Cumbria on a mission to protect our beautiful coast from the biggest ever UK industrial development. Would our views of the Lake District coast from the Coniston Round be blighted in the knowledge that a giant 50km square mine full of hot nuclear waste hunkers beneath the coast? We have been lobbying the biggest and wealthiest charity in Cumbria, Friends of the Lake District to withdraw from their partnership with the developer Nuclear Waste Services and instead to support those in opposition to the plan.
For our fundraising and awareness raising calendar we’re looking for photos of our stunning landscapes and their flora and fauna.
Have you got something incredible to show off?
Our facebook page can be found here https://www.facebook.com/groups/997384242883523
and people can support us by pledging to buy a calendar here:
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/our-lovely-lake-district-in-photos-2027-calendar
yours sincerely,
Marianne Birkby
Lakes Against Nuclear Dump, a Radiation Free Lakeland campaign
Lakes Against Nuclear Dump 
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