Coniston

Slate, beer and the village below the fell

The bar floor of the Black Bull is slate, quarried from the mines in the fells directly above the village, and behind the pub is a brewery. The Bradley family have owned the Black Bull for around forty-eight years; Susan Bradley runs it with her son Ian, who went away, took a degree in brewing, came back, and built the Coniston Brewing Company behind the pub in 1995. Three years later, when the brewery was barely up and running, Bluebird Bitter won Supreme Champion Beer of Britain. In 2012 the brewery did it again with No.9 Barley Wine — named because it was the ninth beer they made — which at 8.5% is the strongest beer ever to take the award; the judges compared it to a fine cognac. You can order the house ales in pints, halves or third-pint tasting flights, and eat haddock fried in Bluebird batter with mushy peas and chips for £19, or Cumberland sausage, or a Moroccan spiced tagine. Card only. When The Telegraph named the Black Bull the best pub in Cumbria, Susan Bradley found out secondhand: "We didn't really know. I think a customer rang us up and asked if we knew so we had a look and then we were just delighted."

The pub is four hundred years old. Turner stayed. Coleridge stayed. So, in the 1950s, did Donald Campbell — but more on him later, because the village would rather you ate first.

Coniston sits at the foot of the Old Man, an 803-metre fell that fills the view at the end of most streets, on the northwest shore of Coniston Water, five miles long and the third largest lake in the Lake District. The passenger trains stopped in 1958. You come in on the A593 from Ambleside, eight miles, or on the 505 bus — the Coniston Rambler, via Hawkshead — or on the X12 up from Ulverston and the Furness Line trains, and everything worth doing is then on foot or on the water.

The village supports six pubs, which for a place this size takes some explaining, and the explanation is walkers. The Sun, at the bottom of the path up the Old Man, is a sixteenth-century inn with eight handpumps, flagstone floors, a cast-iron range still doing the heating and hot water, and a big beer garden. Campbell made it his headquarters for the final record attempt in January 1967 — the pub says he stayed in what is now Bedroom No. 2 — and Anthony Hopkins lodged there in 1988 while playing him in the BBC film Across the Lake. Dogs are welcome everywhere except the conservatory, and the pub keeps dog blankets and beds because some dogs don't like cold slate floors. The steak and ale pie and the Sunday roasts are what reviewers keep mentioning.

Inn tables, new kitchens and farm ties

The Crown, in the village centre, is a Robinsons house run by Diane and her team, refitted in 2023, its rear rooms looking straight at the Old Man. Ten of its thirteen rooms take dogs, muddy boots and all, and there are dog bowls and treats kept behind the bar. The menu is more adventurous than it needs to be — saag aloo pie, Moroccan cauliflower fritters, burrata salad — alongside a sharing board called the Old Man of Coniston. The Yewdale Inn, built in 1896 as part guest house, part bank, now contains Enzo's Caffe & Pizzeria, named in memory of the chef Enzo Mauro, father of one of the owners; the wood-fired oven was imported from Italy, and the Napoletana pizzas run from noon daily. A quarter-mile south at Bowmanstead, the Ship Inn is an eighteenth-century pub on the Cumbria Way run by Jim and Julie, with a log fire, homemade pizzas, and four letting rooms. And down on the lakeshore, the old Waterhead Hotel — where John Ruskin was a regular and, the hotel says, Charles Darwin visited — was restored in 2022 as The Coniston Inn, a forty-seven-bed pub with rooms.

The restaurant to book is Steam, run by chef Sarah and her husband Colin. It started as a pop-up supper club in 2013, became a bistro in 2015, closed in early 2024 in the industry's staffing crisis, and reopened in June 2025 in a new spot by the lake. Fridays and Saturdays it runs a classic bistro menu — two courses £28.95 — and other evenings small plates; the bang bang chicken burger has its own following, and the menu moves with the Cumbrian seasons through scallops, venison, panna cotta and lemon tart with meringue. It is unlicensed, so you bring your own bottle and pay £2.50 corkage, and you reserve, because it has spent years at the top of the village's restaurant rankings. Sara's Indian Restaurant opens evenings only, is also bring-your-own, takes cash only, and does onion bhajis people cross the village for. Our Plaice, the chippy on Lake Road, fries haddock and cod to order Tuesday to Saturday. Also cash only. Coniston has not fully committed to the twenty-first century's payment methods, and seems untroubled by this.

Herdwicks Café & Bistro on Yewdale Road runs the shortest supply chain in the Lakes. It is owned by Gemma and Spencer Metcalfe, village locals, in partnership with Jon Watson and Jo McGrath of Yew Tree Farm up the valley — the seven-hundred-acre National Trust hill farm that Beatrix Potter bought in the 1930s to save from developers, and where she furnished the tearoom parlour with her own furniture. Spencer cooks Herdwick lamb and Belted Galloway beef raised on that farm; Gemma runs the front of house; Jo McGrath, a well-known local artist, has her paintings on the walls. Cooked breakfasts go until half eleven. The farm itself, just north on the Ambleside road, played Hill Top in the film Miss Potter, sells Herdwick hogget and mutton from its Heritage Meats butchery on weekdays, and offers visits where you can meet — the farm says hug — its Ambassador Flock.

Breakfast counters, local shops and the climb

For breakfast the village splits its loyalties. The Green Housekeeper on Yewdale Road is small and homely, produces scones with a following that borders on the devotional, and does a Welsh rarebit and a broccoli and cheddar soup that carry the savoury side; the queue at busy times is part of the arrangement. Down on the shore, the Bluebird Café has been run by Phil and Judith Dixon since 1982. It seats more than 140, bakes its own cakes, hands out free dog biscuits on the covered heated terrace, and stands on the spot where Sir Malcolm Campbell borrowed a steamer slipway in 1939 and set a world water speed record at 141.74 mph. His son Donald set four more records off this shore in the 1950s. Lakes Hot Spot, the bakery-pizzeria hybrid, adds a Polish accent — artisan bread, stone-baked pizza, and a chilli jam garlic bread that turns up in reviews as an inspired decision.

The shopping is genuinely local. The Co-op on Yewdale Road opened in 1898 and is one of the few single-village co-operative societies in Britain to have stayed independent since its founding in 1875, still democratically controlled by its members. Summitreks at number 14, founded in 1987 by Ron Rutland and Hilary Mills, sells walking and climbing kit and runs guided activities. Higgledy Piggledy does antiques, vintage clothes and the owner Hannah's own artwork; Just for Ewe does sheepskins, maps and books; there is a fudge shop with a gallery attached, and a shop on the bridge selling Herdy sheep gifts and pieces of Coniston green slate.

You will, at some point, climb the Old Man. Everyone does. The classic circular from the village runs about six and a half miles, four hours or so, up past Low Water — a corrie tarn once dammed to feed the quarries — to the 803-metre summit, with views over the lake and, on a clear day, to the Isle of Man. Wainwright observed that the fell, though scarred by its quarries, keeps a dignified bearing, and the scars are half the interest: the route up Coppermines Valley leaves from the lane between the Black Bull and the Co-op and climbs past the ruins of what were among the biggest copper mines in Britain. In 1602 as many as five hundred people were employed just carting ore to Keswick; by 1896 there were no workers left. The valley floor is strewn with the foundations of vanished buildings, there are waterfalls at Miners Bridge, and the four-mile circuit up to Levers Water takes about three hours.

Gentler paths, boats and Coniston's defining stories

Gentler options exist. Tarn Hows, two miles north — a landscape Beatrix Potter also bought and passed to the National Trust — has a 1.75-mile gravel circuit suitable for pushchairs and wheelchairs, with all-terrain mobility scooters to borrow and Belted Galloways grazing the shores. The lakeshore path south to Torver jetty is a stile-free three miles; you come back across the water on the Coniston Launch. At Tilberthwaite, Cathedral Cavern is a slate chamber forty feet high, lit through a window opening, an easy mile and a half up a quarry track, and the flooded pit at nearby Hodge Close reflects its own rock face into the shape of a skull — deep, cold, and strictly for looking at. Swimming is done properly elsewhere: three stretches of the lake were designated official bathing waters in 2024, Brown Howe has the shingle beach, and Beacon Tarn, a forty-minute walk in from the southern end, warms faster than the big lakes in summer.

The water is the other half of Coniston. The Boating Centre hires rowing boats, kayaks, canoes and paddleboards — well-behaved dogs welcome in the rowing boats — and the whole lake runs to a ten-mile-an-hour speed limit. The Steam Yacht Gondola, built in 1859 for the Furness Railway's steamer service and rebuilt by the National Trust, still sails from the pier. The Launch's two wooden boats, the Ruskin and the Ransome, run on solar-electric hybrid power and pass Peel Island — the original of Wild Cat Island in Swallows and Amazons. Arthur Ransome learned to sail on this lake as a boy, in a boat belonging to the writer W.G. Collingwood. The boat's actual name was Swallow.

Ruskin is across the water at Brantwood, the house he bought in 1872 and lived in until his death in 1900; he reckoned the view from it the finest in England. His family declined a burial in Westminster Abbey, and he lies instead in St Andrew's churchyard, under a cross of Tilberthwaite slate designed by Collingwood and carved with the symbols of his books. The Ruskin Museum, founded in his memory in 1901, now also holds the village's hardest story: Bluebird K7, the jet hydroplane that flipped at around 320 mph on 4 January 1967, killing Donald Campbell. Boat and pilot lay in the lake until 2001. Campbell's funeral was held at St Andrew's that September, his coffin carried down the measured kilometre by launch one last time, and he is buried in the cemetery behind the Crown. The restored K7 came home in March 2024 and sits in the museum's purpose-built Bluebird Wing; in 2026 it was announced that she is set to return to the water.

County lines, summer traditions and the last stop

Until 1974, all of this was in Lancashire. Nobody seems to miss it.

Each summer the Coniston Country Fair sets up on the lakeshore, with Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, terrier racing, a dry-stone walling competition, and a fell race from the showfield to the summit of the Old Man and back, run in under an hour. In spring around 1,600 runners circle the entire lake in the Coniston 14, a road race organised entirely by a committee of village volunteers.

If you finish your own, slower circuit at the Ship Inn, your dog will be met at the door by the pub's resident dog and offered a Sir Woofchester, the house doggy snack. The humans have to order at the bar like everyone else.