An unwelcome start to Blair's holiday in county ravaged by foot and mouth

Amid palpable local cynicism, the Prime Minister alighted at a small hotel in west Cumbria late yesterday for a long weekend break with his family before their summer holiday in the south of France.

Memories of Tony Blair's last high-profile British holiday remain fresh in the county worst hit by last year's foot-and-mouth epidemic: a promised sojourn in the ravaged British countryside last August turned out to be a few days in four-star splendour at the Carlyon Bay Hotel near St Austell.

Mr Blair, who faced 150 Countryside Alliance protesters when he opened a Cumbrian factory and research centre yesterday, was greeted by evidence that the county's gradual re-emergence from the traumas of foot-and-mouth has left it nervous and fragile. Bookings at the most popular hotels have recovered to the levels of two years ago. But this buoyancy is not shared in the county's outlying parts, which depend upon scraps from the Lake District honeypots of Bowness-on-Windermere and Ambleside.

The 26-room Linthwaite House Hotel at Bowness is among the hotels slightly up on 2000 figures, with an abundance of Japanese guests who flock to the Lakes to visit Hilltop, home to Beatrix Potter, creator of the Tokyo household name Peter Rabbit.

But the patterns of occupancy have changed dramatically. "All the rules just seem to have gone out of the window," said a spokeswoman for the hotel. "We used to be able to plan for times of occupancy but things are more erratic now. It's hard to pin down why."

The Grasmere Gingerbread Shop, a traditional favourite with tourists, is also baffled by the patterns of trade. "Yes, trade's there, but there's something imperceptibly different about it," said Joanne Wilson, the shop manager. "One day it's dead, the next it's quiet." The shop's development of a relatively young mail order business is now more important than ever and it is already striving to make good last year's losses by preparing for its 150th anniversary year in 2004.

There has been no greater demonstration of Grasmere's economic fragility than the saga of the local public conveniences, which the district council had to close because of lack of money earlier this year. Coach tour operators were threatening not to stop off for Grasmere convenience breaks and William Wordsworth's Dove Cottage faced a 20 per cent loss in the revenue it takes from the car park near the toilets. After a vociferous "Save the toilets" campaign in the Westmorland Gazette, the local parish council has intervened to reopen temporarily.

Commercial life is even more perilous in the north Pennines, which mops up the overflow when the Lakes are full with visitors.

Alan Sykes' farm cottages at Talkin are usually 80 per cent full in August but occupancy is down by a quarter this year. "The question we're now asking is whether foot-and-mouth exaggerated a downward trend," Mr Sykes said.

"The entire north Pennines have more vacancies than they usually do. Things do tend to pick up in the autumn because people love the colours here but we do need high-yielding summer weeks."

Even the artist Damien Hirst has been pitched into the effort to bring visitors back. His previously unexhibited Prodigal Son work – a bisected calf in formaldehyde – is on show next to works by great English painters including Turner and Stubbs in an exhibition at Carlisle's Tullie House Museum designed to provide some economic restitution. The exhibition has been a big hit, but it is not the kind of attraction that increases overnight stays.

Mr Blair may have avoided much of Cumbria's edginess by taking to the west of the county. "We were the ones who picked up the extra visitors," said Dr Brian Irving, manager at the Solway Coast Initiative, one of two enterprises seeking to galvanise a part of the county traditionally overlooked by visitors.

"We're always trying to pull people out of the [Lake District] National Park and last year we succeeded because the Cumbrian Coastal Way was open while so many footpaths elsewhere remained closed."