Songfacts®:

• The English poet William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, which is part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. By the turn of the 19th century Wordsworth was living in Dove Cottage on the edge of the village of Grasmere in the center of the Lake District. His fellow romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were frequent visitors to his home.
  
  220 years later, Taylor Swift fell in love with the Lake District during a trip with her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. On "The Lakes," she sings about the beautiful world heritage site.
• Swift finds inspiration in the foothills that surround Windermere, the largest natural lake in England:
  
  Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry
  
  And imagines a social media-free zone in the Lake District's natural world:
  
  A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground
  With no one around to tweet it
  
  Swift also finds her creative muse stirred by walking in the footsteps of William Wordsworth and co.:
  
  Take me to the lakes, where all the poets went to die
  
  She even namechecks Wordsworth with some wordplay:
  
  I've come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze
  Tell me what are my words worth
• Swift also references her Lake District vacation on the Folklore track "Invisible String":
  
  Getting lunch down by the lakes
• "The Lakes" is the featured bonus track on the eight physical deluxe editions of Folklore. The CD, cassette and vinyl versions arrived in stores on August 7. It's likely that date was planned well in advance; two of the Folklore tracks are titled "August" and "Seven," which many of Swift's fans took to be an "Easter egg" that the songstress had something planned for that day.
• Taylor Swift explained in her Disney+ concert film Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions how her trip to the Lake District helped crystallize a dream about leaving her life behind to live in a cottage.
  
  "In the 19th century, you had a lot of poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats who would spend a lot of time there," she said. "There was a poet district, these artists that moved there. They were kind of heckled for it and made fun of for it as being eccentrics. I remember when we went, I thought, 'Man I could see this. You live in a cottage, you've got wisteria growing up the side of it. Of course they would escape like that.'"
• Co-writer and co-producer Jack Antonoff originally conceived this as a big orchestral number. Swift wasn't having it and asked him to make it much smaller. He admitted to Billboard: "I had gotten lost in the string arrangements and all this stuff."
  
  The two were working remotely because of COVID so Antonoff was alone in the studio. After he took everything out and played back the new bare-bones version, he thought to himself, "This is so perfect."
  
  Taylor Swift shared the original lush, orchestral arrangement of "The Lakes" on July 24, 2021 to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Folklore.