The Lake After Everyone Leaves

There is a short stretch of the autumn in which the lake changes register, and it does not do it gradually. One week the shore road is a single file of coaches and hire cars moving at the speed of the slowest of them; the next it runs freely, and a journey that took an hour all summer takes the twenty minutes the map always claimed. The car parks go empty. The ferry carries schoolchildren and shopping. The place does not wind down so much as get switched off, and the abruptness is the first thing that surprises anybody who has only ever known it in season.

The clearest measure is at night, from the water or from a terrace looking across. In high summer the opposite shore is a continuous line of light from one headland to the next. By late autumn there are gaps in it: long dark stretches of hillside where nothing is lit at all, because the windows behind them belong to people who are now in London, Milan or New York and will not be back until the spring. You can read the ownership pattern of an entire shore off it, and it is more legible in the dark than in daylight.

The emptying is not uniform, and that is the part worth knowing. A town with a station, schools and offices carries on much as before, because most of what it does was never for visitors. A village with a real resident population thins but keeps its life. The small waterfront hamlets, the ones people fall in love with in June, contract to something very small indeed, and the gap between a village's summer population and its winter one is a larger multiple than any visitor would guess.

What replaces the noise is not silence but a different set of sounds. A chainsaw somewhere on the hill. A single boat engine crossing two bays away, perfectly audible. Church bells, which in August are lost in everything else.

The winter sun never gets far above the ridge line, so for most of a short day the light travels across the landscape rather than down onto it. Everything acquires a long shadow and a lit edge: the stone of a quay wall, the mouldings on a faade, the ribs of a terraced hillside, the wake of a single boat. All of it stands out in relief in a way it does not at midsummer, when the sun is overhead and the whole place is flattened into glare.

The water changes with it. The summer lake sparkles because a high sun is being broken up by a surface with texture on it. The winter lake, on the calm days, does not sparkle at all. It goes flat and takes the colour of the sky, which for weeks together is a low, even pewter. On those mornings the reflection of the opposite shore is as detailed as the shore itself, upside down and slightly darker, and the line between them is something you have to look for.

The day is shorter than the almanac suggests, for a structural reason rather than an astronomical one: the sun has a mountain to climb before it reaches this water and only a mountain to reach before it leaves. In practice the winter afternoon has a hard edge. There is a moment when the light goes off the far shore, and the temperature and the mood both drop within a few minutes of it.

Some winter mornings the far shore is simply absent. The cloud base sits below the tops, then below the villages, then onto the water, and what is left is an edgeless grey field with a few metres of quay at the near end of it. Scale collapses: you cannot tell whether the lake in front of you is a mile across or a hundred yards, and the boats that pass are audible before they are visible and inaudible again a few seconds later.

The inversions are the other half of it, and they are the reason to go up. On a still, cold, high-pressure day the cloud lies in the trench and the sun is above it, so an hour's walk from the shore takes you out of a grey afternoon into a bright one, with the lake underneath as a white river and the mountains standing out of it on both sides. It is common enough here to be worth planning for, and completely invisible to anybody who stays at the water.

The autumn rain arrives in long heavy falls rather than showers, and it does something to the hillside the summer never shows you: every gully above the shore runs, ravines that are dry stone staircases in August carry water loudly, and there are waterfalls opposite that exist for a fortnight a year. Then the north wind clears it and the clarity is the best of the year: haze gone, air dry, and the high ground at the top of the lake standing up with snow on it. In August you cannot see it at all.

The winter question about a village here is not which place is best but which is open, and the honest answer is that it varies, by village, by proprietor and by year. Some kitchens shut for months, some run a reduced week, some never stop. Published hours are unreliable out of season, and what was open last January is not evidence about this one. Anybody who tells you flatly what is open on this lake in February is guessing, and the only sound method is to telephone.

What does change reliably is the character of the transaction. In August the person behind a counter is dealing with strangers at a rate of one every ninety seconds and has calibrated accordingly. In November they are dealing with people they know, and if you appear often enough you become one of them faster than you would expect.

This is what people mean when they say the lake belongs to the residents in winter, and it is more literal than it sounds. The piazza is being used as a piazza. Children play football against the church wall. An owner who has only ever come in season has met the place in its working uniform, dealing with him, and has never seen it at home.

Walking here in August is a poor proposition and most people who try it discover so about forty minutes in: it is hot, the humidity is considerable, the paths climb steeply from the moment they leave the road, and the haze means the reward at the top is a white smudge. In winter the same routes are a different sport. The air is cold and dry, the ground is empty, and the old ways between the villages, the mule tracks and stepped lanes that connected this shore to itself long before there was a road, run above the roofs, so you spend the walk looking down at the lake at a shallow angle in low light, which is the best way there is to see it.

The particular pleasure, and it is a strange one until you have had it, is snow above water that does not freeze. The lake is deep and holds its heat, so it stays open all winter while the mountains carry snow from partway up. You can stand at the shore in the wet grey mildness of a lakeside December, in a garden where the camellias are about to do something, and look almost vertically up at winter.

Two practical points and the matter is closed. The stone underfoot is wet from October and slippery in a way dry summer stone is not, so the descent is what hurts people. And the light goes early, so a walk in December has to be planned to finish about an hour before you think it needs to.

An owner who arrives at the end of June and leaves at the beginning of September has spent the whole of his relationship with this lake inside its shortest and least representative season. One set of weather, one quality of light, one version of every village, one population. None of them is the ordinary condition of the place. He owns a building in a landscape he has not met.

That is a practical point rather than a moral one. Winter is when you find out how long things actually take here, what the shore road is like in the wet and the dark, whether the walk up from the parking is a charming feature or a problem, and, worth more than any of it, whether you like being here when there is nothing on. Some people discover they love the place only in a crowd. That is a legitimate answer, and much better had before you commit than after.

The house has its own winter argument, which is technical and a separate subject. This is the simpler one. Come once, out of season, for longer than a weekend and without a schedule. Take the first boat that runs, walk a high path on the clear day after rain, and sit somewhere at four in the afternoon when the light goes off the far shore. Then see whether the place holds up with its costume off. The ones that do are the ones worth owning.