WHAT an exciting prospect is being offered by Stagecoach - a chance to ride through the heart of the Lake District in one of their open top buses and look at an entirely new lake.

The map on the side of the buses shows the route clearly.

It says that passengers will get a grandstand view of Windermere, stretching from Bowness to Waterhead, Grasmere, Rydal and - something inbetween which I can only suppose is Amblemere and, presumably, formed by excavating a basin for the new lake in Rothay valley.

It doesn't exactly surprise me; Ambleside is a dour lakeless place where people have for a long time had a chip on their shoulders about being the poor relations as they have no lake of their own and have only been able to borrow a toehold at Waterhead from neighbouring Windermere.

On the other hand, the mystery blue blob could indicate the buses themselves as, in typical rain-drenched Lakeland summers, the upper decks are more akin to mobile open-air swimming pools than viewing platforms.

The buses never failed to amuse me when I lived in Windermere, for even in a half gale they would plough by, usually with half-a-dozen Japanese tourists sitting on top under umbrellas - I guess they must have thought the exercise was some sort of strange British endurance test.

WONDERFUL WOODLAND WALKS

A Reader phoned to point out a touch of irony in last week's Lake District National Park in Action column where the National Park Authority was promoting "a wonderful new network of woodland walks available through the ancient semi-natured broadleaved woodlands of Finsthwaite and the Rusland valley where some of the older native trees date back several thousands of years." What a change of heart over the famous Rusland Beeches which the NPA was determined to fell wholesale a few years ago on the grounds that the ancient trees were a danger to life and limb of everyone who went near them, she says.

CIRCUS SKILLS

I see that Cumbria County Council is to give a £1,000 grant towards teaching circus skills - in Kendal.

Could it be that they plan to send a bunch of clowns down from Carlisle to show poor Council Tax payers how to

juggle their finances to cope with an increase of five times the inflation rate? Some people already have to walk the financial tightrope without county grant aid.