Thirlmere is a reservoir in the Cumberland district in Cumbria and the English Lake District. The Helvellyn ridge lies to the east of Thirlmere. To the west of Thirlmere are a number of fells; for instance, Armboth Fell and Raven Crag both of which give views of the lake and of Helvellyn beyond.
The reservoir runs roughly south to north and is bordered on the eastern side for much of its length by the A591 road and on the western side by a minor road. It occupies the site of a former natural lake: this had a fordable waist so narrow that it was (and is) sometimes regarded as two lakes. In the 19th century Manchester Corporation constructed a dam at the northern end, raising the water level, flooding the valley bottom, and creating a reservoir to provide the growing industrial city of Manchester with water supplies via the Thirlmere Aqueduct.
The reservoir and the aqueduct still provide water to the Manchester area, but under the Water Act 1973 ownership passed to the North West Water Authority; as a result of subsequent privatisation and amalgamation they (and the catchment area surrounding the reservoir) are now owned and managed by United Utilities, a private sector water and wastewater company.
The natural lake We now approached the lake of Wyburn, or Thirlmer, as it is sometimes called; an object every way suited to the ideas of desolation which surround it, No tufted verdure graces banks, nor hanging woods throw rich reflections on surface: but every form which it suggests, is savage, and desolate. Before the construction of the reservoir there was a smaller natural lake, known by various names including Leathes Water, Wythburn Water Thirle Water, and Thirlmere. (The Leathes were the lords of the manor, the valley in which the lake sat was Wythburndale (after the hamlet of Wythburn at its head), 'Thirlmere' probably is derived from " 'the lake with/at the narrowing' from OE þyrel 'aperture', pierced hole' plus OE mere 'lake'") The Ordnance Survey map of 1867Map published 1867, based upon a survey carried out in 1862: shows a single lake (Thirlmere) with its narrowest point at Wath Bridge roughly level with Armboth; at this point "The water is shallow and crossed by a bridge, so that piers are easily built and connected with little wooden bridges, and that difficult problem in engineering - crossing a lake - accomplished" and the map shows both a bridge and a ford between the west and east banks. ('Wath' = 'ford' in Cumbrian placenames: the 'Bridge' itself can be seen in a photograph of the pre-reservoir valley: it was repeatedly carried away by floods (e.g. in November 1861.))
Because of this constriction there were "practically at low water two lakes, the river connecting them being crossed at the Narrows by a little wood and stone bridge", and the natural lake is sometimes characterised as two lakes. The stream exiting the lake (St John's Beck) flowed north to the River Greta, which flowed west through Keswick to join the Cumbrian Derwent.
The 'Thirlmere scheme' Use as a reservoir suggested
In 1863, a pamphlet urged that Thirlmere and Haweswater should be made reservoirs, and their water conveyed (via Ullswater (used as a distributing reservoir)) to London to supply it with a day of clean water; the cost of the project was put at ten million pounds. The pamphlet's authors were G.W.Hemans CE (the son of Felicia Hemans) and R. Hassard CE. The latter had successfully engineered the supply of Dublin with clean water from the Wicklow mountains The scheme was considered by a Royal Commission on Water Supply chaired by the Duke of Richmond, but its report of 1869 dismissed such long-distance schemes, preferring to supply London by pumping from aquifers and abstraction from the Thames.conclusions and recommendations as reported in The scheme continued to be proposed; by 1876, it had grown to include a branch feeder from Llyn Tegid (Bala Lake) and the cost had risen accordingly to £m 13.5;paragraph beginning however nothing ever came of it.
The original scope specified for the Duke of Richmond's royal commission had been the water supply of London and other large cities, but the commission had found itself fully occupied by consideration of the metropolitan water supply.untitled paragraph beginning : the Duke had been President of the Board of Trade from March 1867 to December 1868 For water supply elsewhere, its report had merely made general recommendations: ... that no town or district should be allowed to appropriate a source of supply which naturally and geographically belongs to a town or district nearer to such source, unless under special circumstances which justify the appropriation. That when any town or district is supplied by a line or conduit from a distance, provision ought to be made for the supply of all places along such lines. That on the introduction of any provincial water bill into Parliament, attention should be drawn to the practicability of making the measure applicable to as extensive a district as possible, and not merely to the particular town.
Manchester looks to Thirlmere The corporations of both Manchester and Liverpool had already constructed a series of reservoirs to support their growth (Liverpool at Rivington, Manchester at Longdendale) but saw no possibility of further reservoirs there. Concerned that their existing water supplies would be rendered inadequate by their growth, they were now seeking further supplies: to comply with the royal commission's "no poaching" recommendation any further reservoirs would have to be much further afield. In 1875 John Frederick Bateman suggested that Manchester and Liverpool should supply themselves with water from Haweswater and Ullswater (made reservoirs) as a joint undertaking. Both Liverpool and Manchester corporations rejected this, feeling that the interests of their cities required their water supplies to be independent of any other city. Instead in 1877, Liverpool initiated a scheme for a reservoir on the headwaters of the Vyrnwy in North Wales; at the instigation of their chairman (a native of Cumberland with a second home at Portinscale on Derwentwater),where he - 'John Grave, 52, Mayor of Manchester, Calico Printer' can be found in the 1871 Census (RG10/5235, Folio 23, page 3) the Waterworks Committee of Manchester Corporation proposed to supply Manchester with water from a Thirlmere reservoir.
In their report to the full council, it was noted that water consumption had been a day in 1855, a day in 1865, in 1874 a day on average with peak demand a day. The reliable supply from the Longdendale reservoirs in periods of drought was only per day, but in the last two years, demand had increased by a day. Demand therefore was predicted to exceed the reliable supply in about seven years; it would take at least that to bring any major additional water supply on stream. Any major new works should aim to secure adequate supplies for the next thirty or fifty years; these could only be found in the mountains and lakes of northern Lancashire, Westmorland or Cumberland. Only Ullswater, Haweswater and Thirlmere were high enough to supply Manchester by gravity flow; the natural drainage of all three was to the north, but Thirlmere lay immediately below the pass of Dunmail Raise and the engineering to bring its waters south of the watershed would be significantly easier than for (for example) Ullswater. Thirlmere water had been analysed by Professor Roscoe who pronounced it superior even to that of Loch Katrine and thus one of the best waters known.
Speaking to the report, the chairman of the Waterworks Committee noted that the catchment area was over (in which there were not more than 200 inhabitants) and the annual rainfall about ; a day could be collected and sent to Manchester; unlike the massive dams in Longdendale, all that was needed was a wall fifty-foot high across a gorge he could throw a stone across. As regards aesthetic objections:
The report had predicted little opposition to the scheme, by which it asserted the "beauty of the lake will be rather enhanced than otherwise". Other councillors were less sure of this, one noting that:
The Thirlmere Defence Association
To protect the purity of Thirlmere water, Manchester Corporation set about buying up all the land in its catchment area; the price it offered was such that there was little truly local opposition to the scheme. In Keswick, the nearest town, over 90% of ratepayers signed a petition in favour (Keswick had suffered repeatedly from flooding after heavy rainfall in the Thirlmere area).letter from 'One of the Committee' published as To the south, the only town council in Westmorland (Kendal) voted to support the scheme (hoping that a supply from the aqueduct would be a cheaper solution to their water supply problems than the new waterworks which would otherwise be needed): a local paper noted that "the inhabitants of Westmorland are not much alarmed at it …so far they have stolidly refused to lose their tempers, or even waste many words over it". At a meeting to form a Lake District Association to promote tourism in the region, it was quickly agreed not to take a view on the Thirlmere scheme; otherwise the association would break up before it was fairly started.
The aqueduct, however, was objected to by owners of land through which it would pass: under normal procedure, they would be the only objectors with sufficient locus standi to be heard against the private bill necessary to authorise the scheme. Those who objected to the change in the appearance (as they saw it, destruction of the beauty) of the lake would be unable to demonstrate any financial interest in the matter. They therefore needed to stop the project by mobilising opinion against the scheme; in 1876 this – together with economic hard times – had seen off a scheme to link the existing railheads at Keswick and Windermere by a railway running alongside Thirlmere.and had done so without a Bill ever coming before parliament (Post-Thirlmere, where Lake District railway bills reached committee stage, instructions to the committee required it to consider the impact on scenery, but in both cases the bill was rejected on other grounds)
"If every person who has visited the Lake District, in a true nature-loving spirit would be ready, when the right time comes, to sign an indignant protest against the scheme, surely there might be some hope..." that Parliament would reject the bill, urged one correspondent, who went on to urge legal protection for natural beauty, along the lines of that proposed for ancient monuments by Sir John Lubbock or for the Yellowstone area in the United States.Letter dated "Keswick, June 4" from "J Clifton Ward HM Geological Survey" (but clearly in a private capacity) printed as Octavia Hill called for a committee to organise (and collect funds for) an effective opposition. A meeting at Grasmere in September 1877, considered a report on the Thirlmere scheme from H J Marten CE and formed a Thirlmere Defence Association (TDA) with over £1,000 of subscriptions pledged.advertisement - By February 1878, members of the TDA included Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Thomas Woolner R.A., John Gilbert R.A. and Derwent Coleridge.