The Fox and Hounds sits in the middle of the village, opposite the church, and on most evenings a good share of the people inside have walked thirteen miles to get there. Ennerdale Bridge is the first big overnight stop on Wainwright's Coast to Coast, thirteen miles east of St Bees, so the bar fills with people who set out from the Irish Sea that morning and are working out whether their feet will forgive them.
The inn is a traditional Lakeland one, CAMRA-listed, reopened in 2018 under new management, with five locally brewed ales and three en-suite rooms upstairs. Everything is homemade and cooked to order. The headline dish is the Fox and Hounds Burger Stack — steak mince with smoky cheese, bacon and caramelised red onion in a toasted brioche bun, with homemade onion rings and chips. There are steaks, other burgers, and a long list of vegetarian and vegan options, which is not always a given this far west. Pudding is Lakes Ice Cream.
That is more or less the village's commercial centre. There are no shops to speak of; for those you go to Cleator Moor or Whitehaven. What Ennerdale Bridge has instead is one of the emptiest valleys in the National Park.
A mile east lies Ennerdale Water, and there is no road along its northern shore. You walk it or you don't see it, which makes the flat lakeside circuit one of the quieter ways to spend a few hours in Cumbria. The River Ehen drains the lake westward and runs through the village under one of its three bridges.
Beyond the water the valley turns into Ennerdale Forest — twenty-odd miles of forest road and path, and the setting for Wild Ennerdale, one of England's first large-scale rewilding projects. Since 2003 the Forestry Commission, Natural England and the National Trust have been letting the place go, in the good sense. Herdwick sheep have been removed from much of the valley, native woodland is spreading back, and the River Liza is allowed to move where it wants rather than where anyone has decided it should. It has become a model for how the upland UK might be managed by leaving it largely alone.
Above the valley head stand Pillar and Steeple. Pillar reaches 892 metres, and Pillar Rock, the crag below its summit above High Gillerthwaite, is one of the great rock-climbing venues in the Lake District — a serious objective, not a walk.
St Mary's Church, opposite the pub, is the 1858 building, Romanesque, by Charles Eaglesfield of Maryport. It replaced a late medieval chapel of ease recorded in 1534. Wordsworth and Coleridge came to Ennerdale in 1799, and after Wordsworth talked to the priest about the unmarked graves in the churchyard, he wrote "The Brothers," in which a man returns from sea to find his brother buried without a stone.
Getting here takes some doing: no railway, no regular bus, and a drive in from Cleator Moor on the B5251 or from Cockermouth by way of Lamplugh. Which is rather the point of the place.
