The Lake District, which is not a day trip from anywhere south of Preston

The arithmetic is not close. London to Windermere is two hundred and seventy miles and five and a half hours in each direction on a good day, which is eleven hours of driving before anybody has looked at a lake. Add a stop each way and a two-hour walk and the day is fifteen hours long.

We are asked for it anyway, several times a year, and the answer is the same each time. Two nights in the district costs less in total hire than a single absurd day and delivers a proper visit. Where the budget will not stretch, a day from Manchester is the honest alternative.

The M1 and M6 do almost all of the work, leaving the motorway at junction 36 for the A590 and A591 into Windermere. It is a straightforward run and the last thirty miles are the only interesting part of it.

Two stops on a five-and-a-half hour drive is right, at Corley or Keele in the middle and at Lancaster or Killington Lake towards the end. Killington Lake, on the M6 just before the turn-off, has a genuine view of a reservoir and is the first sign that the landscape is about to change.

Kirkstone, between Ambleside and Ullswater, is fine: it is steep and narrow and the views from the top are worth the climb, and a large car handles it without drama in daylight. The Honister Pass out of Borrowdale is similar.

Hardknott and Wrynose are different. Gradients of one in three, blind hairpins, single track with passing places and drops with no barrier. They are a genuine test in a small car and an unnecessary risk in a large one. We say no to those two, politely and every time.

The literary geography here is unusually concentrated. Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount are two miles apart on the A591; Brantwood sits across Coniston Water from the Old Man; Hill Top is a farmhouse in a lane near Sawrey that has been kept as its owner left it.

All four take a timed ticket in season and all four are small, which is part of their charm and the reason they sell out. A day arranged around two of them works; a day arranged around all four is a day spent looking at car parks.

Staying in Windermere or Bowness is convenient and busy. Staying in Grasmere or Ambleside puts you in the middle of the district with everything within half an hour. Staying in Keswick gives you the northern lakes and Borrowdale on the doorstep and a longer run to the south.

For a three-day trip we would suggest two nights in the central valleys and one in the north, which removes an hour of driving on the third day. The chauffeur stays with the party throughout rather than returning south between days.

This is the version that works as a single day. Manchester to Windermere is around a hundred miles and two hours on the M6, which leaves six or seven hours in the district. That is enough for the southern lakes and Grasmere, or for Ullswater and Keswick, but not for both.

Guests staying in Manchester or Cheshire for business frequently add a Saturday of this kind, and it is a very good use of a spare day. From Liverpool the drive is much the same; from Leeds it is the A65 across the Dales, which is slower and more interesting.

The central Lake District is one of the wettest places in England, and a fell in cloud is a fell you cannot see. There is no planning around this beyond flexibility: the same three days can deliver two of rain and one of the best weather in Britain.

What we do is keep the itinerary loose and reorder it on the morning. Houses, galleries and the Keswick pencil museum on the wet days, high passes and lake shores on the clear ones. A fixed schedule in Cumbria is a schedule that will be wrong twice.