Elterwater

Village Green and Swan Lake

The Britannia Inn stands on the village green, and it has been there for five hundred years. It is one of the most photographed pubs in the Lake District, which is the sort of claim that usually means very little, except that here you can see why: exposed stone, low beams, a green out front, and the whole of Great Langdale rising behind it. The kitchen leans on local producers. You can order home-made Cumberland pâté with port sauce, Somerset Brie in a crisp thyme crumb, Plumgarths of Kendal Cumberland sausage, or slowly braised South Lakes lamb Henry. Lunch, soup and sandwiches run from 2 to 4pm; dinner from 5:30 to 8:30. There is a Britannia Brûlée and a home-made sticky toffee pudding, the latter being more or less compulsory in this part of Cumbria.

The village sits at the foot of the valley where Great Langdale Beck runs down into Elterwater lake, one of the smallest lakes in the district. The name is Old Norse — elptr vatn, swan lake — and the birds still turn up.

Pikes, Falls and Tarns

To the northwest the Langdale Pikes rise sharply. Harrison Stickle is 736 metres, Pike o' Stickle 709, and from the green they look considerably higher than that.

The walking is the reason most people come. A four-mile circuit follows the River Brathay down to Skelwith Bridge and Skelwith Force, a waterfall dramatic enough for its size, on ground that stays relatively flat. Loughrigg Tarn is a shorter walk to a small tarn that reflects the Pikes when the water is still. Cathedral Cavern, a disused quarry cave over toward Little Langdale, gets folded into a good many local routes. Beyond the village the valley opens toward Stickle Ghyll and the higher fells.

Gunpowder and Green Slate

There is a small village shop and, up at the Langdale Estate, a craft centre. The Estate itself has a longer story. In 1824 a Kendal banker named David Huddlestone built a gunpowder works here, on the site of earlier corn and fulling mills, water-powered from the beck. Within a few years it was exporting to North America and South Africa and supplying the local quarries and mines. In 1840 an explosion at the works killed several men. It closed around 1928, and the buildings became the holiday resort you can walk through today.

The other local industry was slate. Elterwater Quarry worked the green Lakeland slate that turns up in walls and roofs across the region — compressed volcanic ash, some 450 million years old, which is a long time for a building material to wait around.

Chapel and the Road In

Holy Trinity is a small nineteenth-century chapel; the parish church proper, St Mary's, is over at Chapel Stile.

Getting here takes some doing. There is no railway — Windermere, about five miles off, is the nearest — so you drive in on the A593 to Skelwith Bridge and then the B5343 into the valley. In season the 516 Langdale Rambler bus runs up from Ambleside.

Swans on the Lake

The swans, meanwhile, keep to the lake, as they have since someone first thought to name it after them.