Kentmere Reservoir

Kentmere Reservoir is a water storage facility situated in the Kentmere valley in the county of Cumbria, England. It is located 10.5 kilometres (6.5 mi) north-northeast of the town of Windermere. The reservoir is fed by the streams which form the headwaters of the River Kent which rise 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) to the north in Hall Cove on the southern slopes of a mountainous ridge called High Street, which is named after the nearby Roman road. It is also fed by Lingmell Gill, which drains the large corrie on the western side of Harter Fell beneath the Nan Bield Pass. After Kentmere Tarn was drained to provide agricultural land in the 1840s, water supply to the mills further downstream became erratic, and the mill owners met to plan a reservoir to regulate the flow. They employed the water engineer John Frederick Bateman to advise, and the Kendal Reservoirs Act 1845 authorised five reservoirs. Despite Bateman's preference for the reservoir at Skeggles Water, the millers opted to build that at Kentmere Head, which was completed in 1848, but cost a lot more than estimated. Millers paid for the water based on the drop in river level at their mill, with small mills exempt from charges. Soon after its completion, cheap coal became available, as railways arrived in the area, and the number of mills using water power steadily declined. This process was exacerbated by the Water Resource

Reservoir data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).