Our late, great Guardian colleague Harry Griffin once wrote a fine piece about the village cobbler in Grasmere, Timothy Tyson, and a friend who ran a local cafe (or 'tea garden' in Harry's exact words) who together swam in all 463 Lake District tarns, including one which they only reached by digging down through deep snow.

This healthy practice may be in for a revival if the fears of local people are realised about gradually reducing access to swimming pools as the local government cuts bite.

Questions have already been raised about the future of special schemes to help young people who struggle to master swimming – a failing which accounted for many more accidents in the past, before school and leisure centre programmes taught the overwhelming majority of us the basics.

There is also concern about potential cuts to school swimming, raised in the current consultation by Cumbria county council about its budget, which has to be reduced like those of all other local councils in the UK.

Now Karen Lloyd emails the Northerner from Kendal with news of cuts made by Lakes Leisure, the charity which runs the town's leisure centre and other facilities under a partnership agreement with South Lakeland district council, which provides the funding. Last year's payment of some £960,000 has been cut by ten percent this year and next year and that is having consequences. These will be more severe if a proposal in the county council's budget not to renew its contract with Lakes Leisure (£270,000 last year) is approved.

Karen, who swims early before work, says:

Early sessions are being cut from April 1 from five per week to three, and lunchtime sessions being cut by fifteen minutes.

This sounds like just the beginning of retrenchment, according to staff at the centre, and Karen elaborates on the effects in a letter to the local MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale Tim Farron, which also raises the prospect of a vicious circle:

Every morning the pool is extremely busy. Pool users turn out in numbers to keep fit by swimming. Sometimes the pool is so busy it is difficult to swim lengths easily. If two sessions per week are cut the obvious effect will be to make the remaining sessions even busier. This will mean that swimmers may well decide to stay away as the pool is more congested and swimming becomes difficult. This will be counter-productive in terms of bringing money into the Leisure Centre, and will clearly have a negative effect on peoples' fitness.

To add to the sense of a much-used facility slipping gradually away, pools in Grange and Troutbeck have closes, leaving Kendal's nearest alternatives as far away as Ulverston, Lancaster and Barrow-in-Furness. Or those freezing tarns.

And Cumbria county council says:

In these tough economic times the council has to focus on its core functions and legal duties, unfortunately support for South Lakes Leisure and funding swimming pools does not fall into this category.

Two reasons for hope, however. In a response from South Lakeland, the council's interim corporate director of communities David Sykes, makes careful but encouraging references to leisure centre users taking a 'Big Society' approach, telling Karen:

There may be other ideas and offers that the users of the centre would have on how and where changes could be made and how revenues may be increased. Is this a discussion you are having with Lakes Leisure?

And he makes a similar point about the council exploring with Tim Farron:

the suggestions in your letter that there is more which central Government could do to help local delivery.

This is a reference to understandable local anger that the cuts coincide with government promotion of this summer's Olympics as a national sportfest, with one-off money going to local councils to promote sport. In Karen Lloyd's words:

Is it not simply derisory to take money away from Leisure Centres, to close sessions that improve fitness at the same time as spending money celebrating the Olympics?

We will keep tabs. Meanwhile, one further piece of evidence that Lake District people want to swim. British Gas's Great North Swim in Windermere in June has already had more than 6000 local applications for the event, which attracted 10,000 swimmers last year