Coledale Beck runs down through the middle of Braithwaite, and above it, more or less straight up, rises Grisedale Pike. The fell is 791 metres and it starts almost from the back doors of the village, which is the sort of thing you notice when you arrive at the foot of the Coledale valley two miles west of Keswick and realise how much of the sky is taken up by a single mountain.
There are two pubs, which is generous for a village this size. The Royal Oak is a traditional Cumbrian inn tied to Jennings Brewery, with four permanent real ales including Cumberland Ale. The food is the kind you want after a day on the fells: Cumberland sausage served in a giant Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips with mushy peas and tartare sauce, pies, and a Sunday roast that comes with unlimited Yorkshire puddings and gravy. Portions are generous. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options are on the menu, and they'll do smaller plates if the giant Yorkshire pudding feels like a commitment too far. There are en-suite rooms upstairs.
The Coledale Inn is the more historically confused of the two. It was built in 1824 as a mill, then spent a brief spell as a pencil factory before Keswick built its big one and made the point moot. It's a family-run place now, dog-friendly, doing homemade pub classics with local and seasonal ingredients and Sunday lunch from noon.
The pencil business is worth staying with for a moment. The graphite came from Force Crag Mine, up the Coledale valley above the village, which fed a cottage pencil industry in Braithwaite until the Keswick factory took over. Force Crag went on mining lead, zinc and baryte and became the last commercially worked mine in the Lake District, closing in 1991. The National Trust owns it now and runs guided tours, so you can walk up Coledale and see where the pencils, in a manner of speaking, came from.
That walk up to the mine is the gentle option. The steeper one is Grisedale Pike itself, a classic northern Lake District ridge climbed directly from the village. For anyone with a full day and reasonable legs there's the Coledale Round, a circuit over Grisedale Pike, Hopegill Head, Eel Crag, Sail and back via Causey Pike. It's counted among the finest ridge walks in the Northern Fells, and Braithwaite sits at the bottom of it like a car park with pubs.
There's a church, St Herbert's, from the nineteenth century. That is most of what there is to say about it, and it doesn't seem to mind.
Shops mean a trip into Keswick, two miles east. There's no railway — there never really was — so you arrive by the A66 running west out of Keswick, or on the Keswick–Cockermouth bus, which passes through. A car is the honest answer.
What Braithwaite mostly is, in the end, is a place to come back down to. The fell fills the window, the beck keeps running through, and there's a pint of Cumberland Ale waiting at the bottom for whichever of the two pubs you decide you belong to.
