At Haverthwaite station, a steam engine gets up its pressure for a 3.2-mile run to Lakeside, at the southern tip of Windermere. The line opened in 1869 as a branch of the Furness Railway, closed to ordinary traffic, and was brought back by volunteers who reopened the heritage stretch in 1973. It is now one of Cumbria's most popular heritage railways, and at Lakeside the train hands you over to Windermere Lake Cruises, so you can arrive at the lake by steam and leave it by boat without touching your car.
The village sits a mile north of Newby Bridge, in wooded low country where the River Leven drains Windermere southward and the Furness Fells rise to the north and east. It is the kind of place that arranges itself around the valley rather than a high street.
There is no shop. For that you go to Newby Bridge or Ulverston.
What there is, is the walking. The Rusland Valley runs north from the village, a quiet wooded valley of coppice and traditional farmland heading toward Rusland and, beyond it, Grizedale Forest — 8,000 acres with a sculpture trail somewhere among the trees. It is proper Lakeland going without the crowds that gather around the honeypot lakes.
A mile from the station, at Finsthwaite, stands Stott Park Bobbin Mill. It is the last operational Victorian bobbin mill in England, now looked after by English Heritage. The valleys around Haverthwaite were once lined with water-powered mills like it, turning out wooden bobbins for the Lancashire cotton trade. Stott Park is the one that survived.
The village pub is the Rusland Pool Hotel, a roadside coaching inn of seventeen bedrooms that spent the 1940s and 50s as a transport café before a 1990s refurbishment and a renaming after the nearby Rusland Pool river. The kitchen runs steak and ale pie, steaks cooked to order with an assortment of sides and sauces, gammon, pasta, beef stroganoff, chicken, fish and burgers, and it takes free-from cooking seriously — more than sixty gluten-free and dairy-free options, which won a silver at the 2017 Free From Food Awards. The beer garden looks out over the Rusland Valley. One caveat: it was reported closed as of January 2024, so check it is open before you set out for dinner.
St Anne's is the parish church, a small Victorian building that does the job a village church does and no more.
Getting here is straightforward enough by car — the A590 near Newby Bridge, or the A5084 up from Ulverston. By train, the nearest mainline station is Ulverston, eight miles off on the Cumbrian Coast Line; the heritage line, sensibly, does not pretend to be a commuter service.
Most villages measure themselves by their pub or their church. Haverthwaite measures itself by the sound of a steam whistle carrying up the valley on a summer afternoon, which is a strange thing for a village to be, and a good one.
