Ambleside

Pints, waterfalls and paths from the door

The Golden Rule on Smithy Brow serves no meals. It has homemade pork pies and scotch eggs behind the bar, and seven cask ales on handpull, and that is the extent of its ambition. The building dates to 1683 — partly built, it is said, from stone scavenged from the Roman fort at Waterhead. Robinsons bought the place in 1982 when they acquired Hartley's Brewery, and in winter they pour Old Tom, an 8.5% dark old ale named after the Robinsons brewery cat. There is no music, no television, and no games machine. The walls are hung with old rock-climbing photographs. The fire is real. Dogs get water bowls and biscuits without having to ask. It is, by a comfortable margin, the best pub in Ambleside, and it achieves this by doing almost nothing.

Ambleside sits at the head of Windermere, England's largest natural lake, in the valley of the River Rothay. The town centre is about a mile north of the water. You can feel this distance — the place reads as a working town that happens to be next to a lake, rather than a resort that grew up around one. The population is around 2,600. The streets climb steeply off the main road. Stock Ghyll, a beck that runs through the middle of town, drops seventy feet over Stock Ghyll Force about fifteen minutes' walk from the shops. If you have come to the Lake District and want to see a proper waterfall before lunch, this is the one.

The walk to Stock Ghyll Force is the gentlest of several that leave directly from town. The most popular steep one is Wansfell Pike, which starts up the same road past the waterfall and climbs to 482 metres on a pitched stone staircase that zigzags up through the bracken. It takes about two and a half hours for the round trip and earns you a view down the length of Windermere and across to the Langdale Pikes. Loughrigg Fell, at 335 metres, is a longer but less punishing circuit — around six miles from Rothay Park — and gives you Grasmere, Rydal Water, and Windermere from different angles on the same walk. Jenkins Crag, reached through Skelghyll Wood, is the one to do if you want a viewpoint without committing to an entire afternoon. Twenty minutes of gentle uphill through oak and birch, then a rocky outcrop with Windermere laid out below you and nothing to do but sit on it.

For bigger days, the Fairfield Horseshoe starts and finishes in Ambleside — an eleven-mile ridge circuit taking in eight Wainwrights, with Fairfield's summit at 873 metres. The Langdale Pikes are a twenty-five-minute drive. Helvellyn is reachable over the Kirkstone Pass. But the walks from the front door are what set Ambleside apart from other Lake District towns. You do not need a car to reach good ground.

Town-centre Ambleside

Back down at street level, the outdoor shops are the first thing you notice. Compston Road has more Gore-Tex per square foot than most small towns have ambition. The Climbers Shop, at Compston Corner, has been here since 1959 — the oldest independently owned outdoor shop in the Lake District. In the early days, Frank Davies sold rubber-soled shoes to a young Chris Bonington and once accepted a guitar as collateral for a rope. Gaynor Sports, at Market Cross, has over two thousand pairs of walking boots on display across three floors. The Epicentre stocks Patagonia and Arc'teryx. You could kit yourself out for an Alpine expedition without leaving a two-hundred-metre stretch of pavement.

Fred Holdsworth opened his bookshop in Central Buildings in 1956. It stocks one of nearly everything rather than piles of the same bestseller. Arthur Ransome browsed the shelves. So did Victoria Wood.

The eating is better than a town of 2,600 people has any right to expect. Ambleside has two Michelin-starred restaurants. The Old Stamp House, on Church Street, has held its star since 2019. Ryan Blackburn runs the kitchen; his brother Craig runs the front of house. The tasting menu is called "A Journey Around Cumbria" and means it — Herdwick hogget, potted shrimps with cauliflower and spiced mead velouté, Cumberland sauce with duck liver and pickled walnut. The building is the cellar of the house where William Wordsworth worked as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, which was a real job. He collected stamp duty for the county for nearly thirty years, on a salary of four hundred pounds a year. The tasting menu costs £105.

Lake Road Kitchen, the second star, arrived in 2024. James Cross worked at Noma in Copenhagen and Per Se in New York before opening here in 2014 — a decade of Nordic-influenced tasting menus with Lake District produce before the Michelin inspectors caught up. The interior is wooden planks and sheepskin throws. The menus change daily.

From town to Waterhead

If those are more than you had in mind for a Tuesday, the options step down gracefully. Doi Intanon has been serving Thai food in the Old Market Hall for over twenty years — family-run, no MSG, and the Emerald Seabass is the dish people come back for. The Priest Hole occupies part of Kelsick Old Hall, a sixteenth-century building with an actual priest hole in the kitchen, now glassed over. Fish night on Tuesdays, steak night on Thursdays. Zeffirellis has been here for over forty years. It is vegetarian, Italian-leaning, and also a five-screen cinema and jazz bar — you can book a two-course meal with a reserved cinema seat, which is the kind of offer that only makes sense in a town where the nearest multiplex is in Kendal. Fellinis, its sibling restaurant upstairs, calls itself "Vegeterranean" and changes the menu seasonally.

The Apple Pie, on Rydal Road, has been a bakery and café since 1975. The Cumberland sausage and cider pie is the thing to eat if you are hungry, and the signature apple pie if you are not. La Liste recognised it as one of the three thousand best pastry shops in the world, which appears to have had no visible effect on the Apple Pie whatsoever.

The Unicorn Inn, on North Road, claims to date from the 1450s. It is also a Robinsons house, and the kitchen does Sunday roasts and Cumberland sausage with chips when it is open, which during quieter months means Fridays through Sundays. Up the hill outside town, the Drunken Duck has its own brewery on site — Barngates Brewery, where the beers are named after old pub dogs. It holds a Michelin listing, and the food runs to rabbit, leek and bacon terrine and venison suet pudding.

A mile south of town, Waterhead is where Ambleside meets the lake. The pier is the boarding point for Windermere Lake Cruises — the red cruise takes seventy-five minutes to Bowness. Borrans Park, the green space beside the pier, is where the Romans built a fort. Galava — if that is what it was called, and the identification is still argued over — was first occupied around AD 79 by a unit of infantry. Under Hadrian it was rebuilt in stone. The foundations of the granary, the headquarters building, and the commanding officer's house were excavated between 1914 and 1920 and are still visible as low walls in the grass. A tombstone found on the site bore the inscription "killed within the fort by the enemy." Now it is a flat field where people eat sandwiches and throw balls for dogs.

Bridge House and the Victorian spire

Ambleside was not recorded in the Domesday Book — William's surveyors did not get this far north. The town's documented life begins later. A market charter was granted in 1650, primarily for wool and yarn. The Salutation Hotel started as a tavern around the same time, in 1656. Keats stayed there. So did Tennyson, who worked on Morte d'Arthur during his visit.

Bridge House is the town's most photographed building and the smallest property the National Trust has ever owned. It was built in the late seventeenth century over Stock Ghyll by the Braithwaite family, probably as a summer house and apple store. Over the years it has been a counting house, a tea room, a weaving shop, a cobbler's, a chairmaker's, and home to a family of eight. By the 1920s it was falling apart. A fundraising committee that included Wordsworth's grandson and Beatrix Potter's husband raised £1,244 11s 10d to buy it and hand it to the National Trust.

St Mary's Church was designed by George Gilbert Scott and built between 1850 and 1854, because the old parish church of St Anne could no longer cope with the tourists the railway was bringing. On the west wall there is a twenty-six-foot mural by Gordon Ransom, painted in 1944, depicting the Rushbearing — a ceremony held on the first Saturday in July in which rushes are carried through the town to the church floor. The mural contains sixty-two figures, all real Ambleside residents of the time. Ransom was at the Royal College of Art, which had been evacuated to Ambleside during the war.

Buses and living traditions

Harriet Martineau moved here in 1846, built a house called The Knoll, and lived there until her death in 1876. She was a journalist, a political economist, and she formed a Property Association to help local working families build their own homes. Charlotte Mason, the educator, arrived in 1889 and founded the House of Education, which is now part of the University of Cumbria at the northern end of town. Kurt Schwitters, the German Dadaist who fled the Nazis, came in 1945 and spent his last years here. His final Merzbau was started in a barn in nearby Elterwater. He died in Kendal in January 1948 before finishing it and is buried in St Mary's churchyard. The Armitt Museum holds a collection of his work alongside Beatrix Potter's watercolours of fungi.

The 555 bus runs from Keswick through Grasmere to Ambleside and on to Windermere, Kendal, and Lancaster. Windermere station, on the branch line from Oxenholme, is about four miles south. If you are driving, the car parks fill early in summer.

On the last Thursday of July, Ambleside Sports takes over Rydal Park. The event dates to the seventeenth century. There is Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, fell racing, and hound trails — ten miles for senior hounds, five for puppies, following a scent of aniseed and paraffin dragged across the fells. Children who carry rushes at the Rushbearing a few weeks earlier get a piece of Grasmere gingerbread for their trouble, which is the kind of payment arrangement that only works if you are under ten.