Where I Was Meant to Be

Note three

5 September 2026

By Aimee

Long before we lived in the Lake District, we kept coming back.

We had favourite walks, places we loved and roads that had become familiar. We even chose to spend our honeymoon here.

We had talked about living in the Lake District one day. It was something we dreamed about and imagined for our future, just not something we expected to happen quite so soon.

When it did, it felt strangely like coming home.

I have often wondered about that.

I have been thinking about it recently after reading Esther Rutter’s All Before Me. Rutter tells the story of the year she spent working at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, arriving there after a difficult period in her life. As she writes about her own recovery, she also follows William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s arrival at Dove Cottage in 1799 and the sense of home they found there after years of feeling unsettled.

What stayed with me was the way Rutter describes finding belonging through more than the landscape. It was the people she met, the community around Dove Cottage, the stories of those who had lived there before her and the feeling of being anchored in a particular place.

It made me think about our own experience. We had loved the landscape for years, but when we moved here it was the small things that began to make it feel like home.

I remember the drive to Windermere when I started work there. Seeing the lake come into view on the way was such an ordinary part of the journey yet I remember thinking how lucky I was that this was now my commute.

At home we have a view of the fells from our window. In the evenings we would walk up Kendal Fell and look back across the town. These were small moments but they gave me the feeling that the life we had talked about for the future had somehow arrived.

View from the walk up to Kendal Fell

It did not feel like we had started again somewhere completely new. It felt as though we had found our way to somewhere that had been waiting for us.

There is something about standing in the landscape that still gives me a sense of awe. I can be driving through the lanes or walking through a town or village and feel that same pull towards it that I felt when we first started coming here.

I do not think I will ever take that for granted.

The landscape was the reason we had fallen in love with the Lake District. The people were part of what made it feel like home.

Moving from London made the difference particularly noticeable. People chatted and took the time to get to know us. They recommended cafés and restaurants and places to explore. I remember someone in a shop recommending the pizzas at Marra. People at work suggested their favourite brunch spots and invited us to join them for coffee. Someone else recommended Scout Scar for a walk, which is now one of our favourite places to walk with Lennon, our cocker spaniel.

Those small encounters were part of how we began to find our place here.

A recent walk along the Ambleside Postal Path brought that sense of history into focus for me. Jean Brennand walked the route as a postwoman six days a week in all weathers. Walking the same path generations later made me think about all the lives that have been lived here before us.

The Lake District has been home to generations of people before us. Thinking about that makes me feel quite humble. We have arrived in a place that already had its own stories long before we were here.

It makes me feel grateful that somehow we found our way here.

I think some places stay with us before we understand why.

We came because we loved the landscape. We had already imagined a future here. When that future arrived sooner than we expected, it felt less like starting again and more like arriving somewhere we had been heading towards for years.

I know we are only here for a small part of its much longer story. There were people here before us and there will be people here after us.

For now, we get to be part of it.

I feel very lucky about that.

Perhaps that is what belonging feels like. Not knowing exactly why a place feels like home, only knowing that somehow it does.