Her Majesty the Queen and Princess Anne visited the Lake District today and included a cruise of Lake Windermere in their itinerary. Boarding the MV Teal at Bowness Pier the Royal party sailed to Brockhole Pier where they disembarked and toured the Brockhole estate.

Commenting on the visit Lake District National Park chief executive Richard Leafe said:
“This was our best ever day. To have the Queen and Princess Anne see the Lake District in all its sensational summer glory and be told how much they enjoyed the visit will further boost the profile of England’s leading and largest national park.”

The new Brockhole Pier, which was designed by Beckett Rankine, has made such visits possible opening up the Brockhole area to waterborne visitors. The location for the pier presented some difficult design challenges since the ground conditions consist of soft silt overlying granite. Piling for the pier would have been prohibitively expensive so we designed the floating pier to be moored on a combination of Seaflex tensioned mooring lines and the pier’s tubular access brow which acts as a longitudinal restraint. The pier is designed to accommodate Windermere’s largest passenger vessels which displace in excess of 250 tonnes.