EVER heard of The Lancashire Lake District? Some of you will have done. For those who haven’t, it isn’t a few ambitiously-named pools tucked away near perhaps Rochdale or Oldham.

No, it’s the real Lake District – or rather part of it. There was a time when you could stroll down a field from the hamlet of Little Langdale, in Westmorland, virtually synonymous with Lakeland, cross its eponymous beck by an ancient, picturesque stone footbridge – and find yourself in Lancashire. It was a romantic experience – fun for children – to stand in the middle of this small bridge with a foot in each of two counties.

Coniston Water, on which Donald Campbell famously died setting what would have been the world water speed record, is more deeply inside the Lancashire Lake District. And on the Wrynose Pass, not too far away, stills stands the Three Shires Stone, where Westmorland, Lancashire and Cumberland, the three Lakeland counties, met.

Actually they still do. And Slaters’ Bridge, that delightful gem of Little Langdale, so named from its use by quarrymen, remains a boundary bridge. But few today regard it as such. The Lake District is entirely in Cumbria now – or so its millions of visitors believe.

Why did Lancashire make little, in any, fuss over losing the priceless promotional asset of a share in Britain’s premier national park? Probably because it accepted the government’s word, when local authorities were reshaped in 1974, that “the new county boundaries are for administrative areas and will not alter the traditional boundaries of counties”.

In reality, because the new administrative counties figure so largely in people’s lives, they have largely supplanted the old in the public’s consciousness. Doughty efforts by the Association of British Counties to keep the historic counties to the fore have enjoyed only moderate success. In 2014, for example, the government gave councils permission to erect signs showing the historic county boundaries. But very few have. The minister responsible at the time, Eric Pickles remarked: “Previous governments have tried to wipe the counties off the map.”

Now, talking much the same talk, comes his successor, Jake Berry. Describing himself as “a proud Lancastrian”, which is why I opened out with Lancashire’s Lakeland, he declares: “Our historic counties are at the heart of communities and are part of the fabric of British society that has been woven into our national story since Saxon times.” Wow. Can’t blow the trumpet much harder than that can you? But it trails into a pipsqeak. For Mr Berry is merely instructing his civil servants to draft new guidance for the local councils on promoting the traditional counties. Why should they be any more enthusiastic than in the past?

What is needed is nationwide action to mark the historic counties – the real counties. But do enough people care? Where is the evidence that Darlington is unhappy to be excluded from County Durham? And though Yorkshire (admirably) makes a huge song and dance over its identity, former West Riding communities now basking in bucolic North Yorkshire, a purely administrative county, would be in no hurry to regain a branding associated with woollen mills and dour gritstone terraces.