The Lake District – An Honest Guide
England’s most famous mountains and lakes without the brochure gloss: 18 million visitors, traffic and housing pressure, Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter – and the slave trader who held regattas on Windermere.
The Lake District at a glance
The Lake District is England's largest and most visited national park: a knot of mountains – locals call them fells – cut by glaciers into long, deep valleys, each with its lake, its slate villages and its own character. It was made a national park in 1951 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017, recognised as a cultural landscape shaped by hill farming, poets, painters and the conservation movement that began here.
- Where: Cumbria, north-west England – about 3 hours by train from London, 1.5 hours from Manchester.
- Highest point: Scafell Pike, 978 metres, the highest mountain in England.
- Largest lake: Windermere, about 10.5 miles long. Only one body of water here is officially called a "lake" – Bassenthwaite Lake; the rest are "meres" and "waters".
- Deepest lake: Wastwater in Wasdale, below the screes of England's most dramatic valley.
- Visitors: about 18 million a year, against roughly 40,000 people who live inside the park.
- How they arrive: the park authority estimates over 80 per cent come by car.
- Money: car parks typically charge about £8–12 for a day in the busy valleys; National Trust car parks are free for members.
The honest picture
The Lake District you see in the brochures – an empty lake, a single walker on a ridge, mist rising off the water at dawn – exists. You will find it at six in the morning, in November, or in the western valleys most visitors never reach. What you will also find, on any sunny weekend between Easter and October, is a traffic queue from Windermere to Ambleside, cars parked on the verges of narrow lanes, and a line of people on the path up Catbells.
The park authority's own planning documents say that on a single school-holiday day there may be 75,000 to 100,000 visitors in the park, most of them day trippers in their own cars. The conservation charity Friends of the Lake District reports that more than three-quarters of residents it polled agree that parts of the Lake District are "full", and it has campaigned for some form of visitor charge to pay for the damage. Littering, disposable barbecues left on the shore and illegal "fly camping" are a real problem the authorities complain about every summer.
There is another side that visitors rarely hear about: housing. So many cottages in villages such as Grasmere, Hawkshead and Coniston are holiday lets or second homes that young local people cannot afford to stay. The park authority now attaches local-occupancy conditions to many new homes. When you choose where to stay, a locally owned guesthouse or a farm B&B keeps more of your money in the valley than an anonymous holiday-let platform.
Where to go: the valleys, one by one
Windermere and Bowness
The busiest corner of the park and the easiest to reach by train. Windermere is the village around the station; Bowness is the lakeside resort a mile downhill, full of boat piers, ice cream and the World of Beatrix Potter attraction. Windermere Lake Cruises run all year between Lakeside in the south, Bowness and Ambleside in the north. Honestly: Bowness on a summer Saturday is the Lake District at its most crowded. Take a boat out onto the water and the crowds disappear in ten minutes. The car ferry across the middle of the lake leads to the quieter western shore and Hill Top.
Ambleside and Grasmere
Ambleside, at the head of Windermere, is the walkers' town – outdoor shops, cafés and a good base without a car. Grasmere, four miles north, is Wordsworth country: Dove Cottage, his grave in St Oswald's churchyard, and Sarah Nelson's gingerbread, made to the same recipe since the 1850s. Walk the old coffin route between Rydal and Grasmere for the views the poet saw every day.
Keswick, Derwentwater and Borrowdale
Keswick is the northern capital of the Lakes, a proper market town with a Saturday market and Castlerigg Stone Circle on a hill outside, a Neolithic ring older than Stonehenge's great stones and ringed by mountains. A launch circles Derwentwater all year. South of the lake, Borrowdale is often called the most beautiful valley in England. The open-top bus 78 runs through it to Seatoller below Honister Pass.
Buttermere and the north-western fells
Buttermere is small, steep-sided and almost perfect – a level path runs right round the lake in about two hours, and it is one of the best walks in the park for families. Honestly: the tiny village car parks fill by mid-morning, and the road over Honister Pass is single-track with gradients of up to 25 per cent. Many hire cars and camper vans struggle.
Ullswater
The second-largest lake, long and winding below Helvellyn. The Ullswater 'Steamers' – heritage boats that once carried mail and workers to the lead mines – sail between Glenridding, Howtown and Pooley Bridge. Walk back from Howtown to Glenridding along the shore path, and stop at Aira Force waterfall. Helvellyn's Striding Edge is a famous scramble but has claimed many lives: it is no place for beginners in wind, ice or cloud.
Coniston and Hawkshead
Coniston Water is where Donald Campbell died in 1967 trying to break the water speed record; his boat Bluebird K7 was recovered from the lake in 2001. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin lived at Brantwood on the eastern shore, now a museum with a fine garden. Hawkshead is a cluster of whitewashed cottages where Wordsworth went to school; the Beatrix Potter Gallery is in her husband's former solicitor's office.
Wasdale, Ennerdale and Eskdale – the west
This is where to come if you want the Lake District without the queues. Wasdale has Wastwater and Scafell Pike, England's highest mountain, and a pub at Wasdale Head that has served climbers since the Victorian era. Ennerdale has no public road along its lake at all. In Eskdale, the narrow-gauge Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway – "La'al Ratty" – runs from the coast at Ravenglass up into the valley. The western valleys are closest to the Cumbrian coast and to Whitehaven – see below.
Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter and the people who "saved" the Lakes
William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in 1770 and lived at Dove Cottage in Grasmere with his sister Dorothy from 1799 to 1808, where he wrote much of his greatest poetry and she kept her Grasmere journal. Today Dove Cottage is run by the Wordsworth Trust as Wordsworth Grasmere, with a museum and an archive holding the great majority of his original verse manuscripts. Entry includes a timed, semi-guided tour of the cottage – book ahead in summer. Tickets last a year.
Wordsworth's 1810 Guide to the Lakes called the district "a sort of national property" – an idea that later fed into the National Trust, co-founded in 1895 by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley of Crosthwaite near Keswick. Beatrix Potter, the author of Peter Rabbit, used her book money to buy farms and breed Herdwick sheep. When she died in 1943 she left 4,000 acres and 14 farms to the National Trust.
Her farmhouse, Hill Top at Near Sawrey, is kept as she left it. It is tiny, and advance booking with a timed arrival slot is essential for everyone arriving by car, including National Trust members. There is no direct bus: from Windermere take the boat or car ferry across the lake and walk or cycle the last two miles, or join a tour that includes the entry.
The slave-trade link nobody mentions on the lake cruise
On the eastern shore of Windermere, just south of Bowness, stands Storrs Hall, a Georgian mansion that is now a hotel, with a small stone temple on the end of a jetty in the lake. In 1806 it was bought by John Bolton, born in Ulverston on the edge of the Lakes, who had gone to St Vincent as a teenager and made a fortune as a Liverpool merchant, slave trader and slave owner. The Legacies of British Slavery database at University College London lists dozens of slaving voyages linked to him between the late 1780s and 1807, when Britain abolished the trade, and records that he left around £180,000 derived from the slave economy when he died in 1837.
At Storrs, Bolton held regattas and entertained the leading figures of his day – Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott and the politicians George Canning and William Huskisson among them. Wordsworth wrote warmly of him. The house passed to Bolton's heirs, the Staniforth family, whose fortune also came partly from the Liverpool trade.
Bolton was not alone. Many Cumbrian families made money as captains, shipowners and plantation owners, sailing from Lancaster, Liverpool and Whitehaven. On the Cumbrian coast, Whitehaven fitted out 69 slaving voyages between 1710 and 1769, and The Rum Story museum there tells the trade through the Jefferson family's dealings with Antigua. A generation later, Thomas Kent, who had been held as a slave by the Senhouse family at Calder Abbey near the western fells, saw his son John Kent become Britain's first known Black police officer in Maryport and Carlisle.
Walking the fells safely
The Lake District mountains are small by world standards, but the weather turns fast, paths are rough and the cloud can come down to valley level within an hour. The volunteer mountain rescue teams in the Lakes are called out hundreds of times a year, often to walkers who set out in trainers with a phone as their only map.
- Check the fell-top forecast before every walk – the park runs a Weatherline service with conditions from the summit of Helvellyn.
- Carry a paper map and compass, waterproofs, a warm layer, food and a torch. Phone batteries die in the cold.
- Scafell Pike is best climbed from Wasdale Head; allow 5–6 hours there and back. The summit is a boulder field often in cloud.
- Striding Edge and Sharp Edge are scrambles with real drops. Do not attempt them in wind, wet or winter conditions without experience.
- Lakes are cold all year. Cold water shock drowns strong swimmers; never swim near boat routes on Windermere or Derwentwater.
- In an emergency call 999, ask for the police, then Mountain Rescue.
Getting there and getting around without a car
By train
The West Coast main line from London Euston and Glasgow stops at Oxenholme (for Kendal and Windermere) and Penrith (for Ullswater and Keswick). From Oxenholme, a branch line runs to Windermere station in about 20 minutes. Manchester Airport has direct trains towards Windermere and Oxenholme – see our Manchester Airport guide. The Cumbrian Coast line serves Ravenglass and Whitehaven for the western valleys.
By bus
- 555 – Lancaster, Kendal, Windermere, Ambleside, Grasmere and Keswick; the backbone of the park, running at least hourly.
- 599 – open-top double-decker along Windermere between Bowness, Ambleside and Grasmere, frequent in summer.
- 78 – the open-top Borrowdale bus from Keswick to Seatoller.
- 508 – Penrith to Glenridding and Patterdale, some journeys over the Kirkstone Pass to Windermere.
A Stagecoach Explorer day ticket gives unlimited bus travel across Cumbria, and combined bus-and-boat tickets are sold with Windermere Lake Cruises, the Keswick Launch, Ullswater 'Steamers' and the Coniston Launch. Winter timetables are thinner – check before you set off.
By car
The M6 runs along the eastern edge; Junction 36 for the South Lakes, Junction 40 at Penrith for the North. Hardknott and Wrynose passes are among the steepest roads in England – do not attempt them in a large vehicle or in ice.
When to go – and how long
It rains a lot: Seathwaite in Borrowdale is often named the wettest inhabited place in England. That is why the lakes exist. May, June and September usually bring the best mix of light, weather and space. July and August are busiest; October brings colour and quieter paths; winter can be glorious on a clear, frosty day, but many cafés shorten their hours and the fells need winter skills.
Three days lets you see one area properly; a week lets you add the west. A single day trip from Manchester or Liverpool is possible by train to Windermere, but you will only see the busiest corner.
Visiting with a guide
Small-group tours from Windermere and Manchester cover the central lakes, Beatrix Potter country and the high passes, and some include entry to Hill Top – useful when timed slots are hard to get.
Tours and experiences
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome.
Read next
The port on the edge of the Lakes that sent ships to Africa.
Whitehaven, Sunderland Point and 23 more honest seaside stops.
An hour north of Keswick – Rome's frontier and the men who guarded it.
England's great medieval city, across the Pennines.
England's other famous landscape – and its empire money.
All our guides to England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Where Bolton's ships went
Liverpool's slave ships, Bolton's among them, bought captives on the West African coast – from the Gold Coast forts to the rivers of Sierra Leone – and sold them in the Caribbean. The castles where people were held before the crossing still stand: read about Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle in Ghana, and about Sierra Leone on Sierra Leone – African Independence. On this site, the Royal African Company and the Gold Coast forts tells the British side.
The African side of the story
Britain Adventures is an independent partner website. Our partner sites on Africa and its history are where the stories on this page continue:
- Pan-African: African Independence · Uganda · Egypt · Sierra Leone · All African Radio Stations
- Ghana: Ghana-Net · Cape Coast Castle · Elmina Castle · James Fort, Accra · They Made Ghana · War Cemetery Cape Coast
- Across Africa: Kenya Web News · Explore Nigeria · Gambia Vibes · Zambia Vibes
- European history: V2 Rocket and Peenemünde · Tannenberg Memorial
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