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During the 15th and 16th centuries, many fortified tower houses and pele towers, such as Dacre Castle, were built as protection against the ‘Border Reivers’ who repeatedly made raids into what was known as the ‘Debateable Lands’ to rustle cattle, pillage and extort money. Once the borderline between England and Scotland was finally agreed in 1552 raiding diminished. Then when the thrones of Scotland and England were united in 1603, King James embarked on the ‘Pacification of the Borders’, rounding up the main reiver families and deporting many of them to Ireland. Religious communities also settled in the Lake District during the Middle Ages. Cartmel Priory survives intact as the village church, the abbey at Shap was largely dismantled after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the middle of the 16th century and an earlier abbey at Dacre was destroyed by Vikings in the 10th century.

Today we value the Lake District for recreation and enjoyment and tourism is the mainstay of the local economy. But its natural resources meant it was once a hive of industry. There is evidence of mining and quarrying from the 12th century, but the Romans clearly quarried materials for roads and buildings locally. Over the centuries, lead, copper, zinc, baryte, haematite, tungsten, graphite, fluorite, and coal have all been mined and quarried on a small scale within the boundaries of the national park; today slate mining continues at the top of the Honister and Kirkstone passes. Coal, iron ore and haematite were mined on a large scale at sites in West Cumbria in the 19th and early 20th centuries. To the east, granite and limestone are still quarried at Shap.