The public bar of the Bridge Hotel takes walkers in muddy boots, which is just as well, because there is very little else to do in Buttermere but walk. The village is two hotels and a handful of farms at the bottom of a glacial valley, and the Bridge is the larger of the two. It pours its own Bridge Inn Blonde, brewed up the road at the Tractor Shed, alongside the usual local ales, and the kitchen does steak and ale pie with local prime beef, burgers, steaks and a Sunday lunch. There is also a dog menu, which runs to Cumberland sausage. The reviews call it a true dog-friendly hotel, and they mean it.
The other pub is the Fish Inn, five minutes' walk from both Buttermere and Crummock Water, which sit end to end in the valley floor separated by a short flat meadow. The current inn stands on the site of the original, and the original mattered, because the landlord's daughter became briefly one of the most famous women in England.
Her name was Mary Robinson, the Maid of Buttermere. Tourists came specifically to look at her. In 1802 she married a man styling himself Colonel the Honourable Alexander Hope MP, who turned out to be John Hatfield — a bigamist, forger and conman. The story ran across the national press; Coleridge wrote it up for the Morning Post. Hatfield was arrested, escaped, was recaptured in South Wales, tried at Carlisle for forgery because that was the offence most likely to stick, and hanged in September 1803. Mary married a farmer in 1807 and lived quietly in Caldbeck for the rest of her life.
The walking is why you come. The Buttermere Circuit is a flat 3.5 miles around the lake, including a stretch tunnelled straight through a rock face above the shore. Haystacks is a moderate four-mile round and was Wainwright's favourite fell — he called it "a mountain of infinite variety." Fleetwith Pike gives you one of the finest views in the Lakes looking back down to the lake, and the Red Pike and High Stile ridge is the long day out along the tops. Above the village, Sour Milk Gill drops off the fellside as High Force and feeds the lake.
St James's is a tiny Victorian church from 1840, dropped into an outsized setting. One of its windows is dedicated to Alfred Wainwright, who lived much of his later life in the valley and asked for his ashes to be scattered on Haystacks. They were.
Getting here is part of the point. There is no railway — this is the remotest of the major Lakeland valleys. By car it's the B5289 from Keswick over Honister Pass, spectacular and steep and narrow in roughly equal measure, or the gentler run from Cockermouth via Lorton. In season the 77 and 77A buses make the Honister crossing from Keswick, which is regularly named one of the most scenic bus routes in England.
On a wet afternoon, the whole population of Buttermere can fit in one bar, boots and dogs included, waiting for the cloud to lift off Haystacks.
