Hawkshead

Car-free lanes and village inns

The King's Arms, in the Square, was named the best pub in Cumbria at this year's National Pub & Bar Awards. The building has been taking in travellers since the reign of Elizabeth I, and there is an old well at the back door. It reopened in August 2025 after a renovation by Cumbrian tradespeople who kept the oak beams, the stone fireplaces and the slate floors, and the head chef, Ross Bowman, cooks beef brisket pie with an Eden Sunset Cheddar crust, Cumberland scotch egg with homemade brown sauce, king scallops in a Kashmiri sauce, and, for pudding, Cranachan cheesecake or an Arctic roll. The regular beer is Loweswater Gold, a past CAMRA Champion Golden Ale of Britain, brewed nearby on the shore of Esthwaite Water. The eight bedrooms upstairs are each named after a king. Breakfast is residents-only — the owner, Jo McGowan, decided not to compete with the village cafés, which tells you a fair amount about how Hawkshead operates.

The village itself has been car-free for more than fifty years. You leave the car at the pay-and-display on the edge (minimum £2.80) and walk in, at which point the medieval street plan takes over: whitewashed cottages, cobbled alleys, overhanging gables, and a sequence of small squares that seem less planned than agreed upon. The population at the last count was 519. Hawkshead sits on a low ridge with Esthwaite Water just to the south and wooded hills rising towards Windermere in the east, and nothing in the village is more than a short walk from anything else.

That includes the other three pubs, all a short stroll from the King's Arms. The Red Lion on Main Street is the oldest — billed as a fifteenth-century coaching inn, refaced in the nineteenth century, with two carved corbels up in the eaves: one a man with a pig, the other a man playing bagpipes. Nobody seems to know why. Inside there is a real fire, darts, dominoes, a pool table, a surprising quantity of Liverpool FC memorabilia, and a dedicated dog menu, so your dog dines with you rather than under you. Lunch runs to a soup-and-sandwich deal for £10; evenings bring steak and ale pie, lasagne, and sausage and mash. Four handpulls rotate, usually Bowland and Bowness Bay breweries.

More village inns and local food

The Queen's Head, a few doors along, is early seventeenth century and a Robinsons house. Sixteen bedrooms, all recently refurbished with Hypnos beds, six of them dog-friendly — and the whole downstairs is open to dogs, with real fires to steam them dry. The kitchen holds an AA Four Star award and does fresh steamed mussels, Cumbrian rib-eye, and a cheese and onion pie that regulars order on repeat.

The Sun Inn markets itself as seventeenth century; Historic England, which listed it, says probably eighteenth. Either way it has a flagged floor, eight bedrooms including four-posters, a beer garden at the rear, one AA Rosette, and a menu that runs to a crispy pollock butty at £24, mussel and cider chowder, and shepherd's pie at £26, with a discretionary 12.5% service charge on top. The inn stands on old grammar-school land, so for centuries its landlords paid rent to the school governors, and Beatrix Potter put it in a scene in The Tale of Mr. Tod. When the local historian H.S. Cowper counted the village's inns in 1899 there were five. The Brown Cow has gone, but four out of five, in a village of five hundred people, is a respectable survival rate.

The cafés the King's Arms declines to compete with deserve the courtesy. The Minstrels Gallery Tea Rooms occupies a fifteenth-century building in the Square that is believed to have been a pub itself once, the Crown and Mitre. All the cakes are baked on site by Jo — Victoria sandwich, lemon drizzle, vegan sticky ginger, Borrowdale teabread — and there are more than twenty loose-leaf teas, served in pots, with locally roasted Rinaldo's coffee and Cumberland-sausage baps in the morning. Closed Wednesdays. Grandy Nook Coffee Shop hides up an alley near the village shop, in the oldest corner of the village; the soup with homemade bread is the thing people mention. Poppi Red on Main Street was founded by Kim, who converted a former art gallery after years of travelling; it does breakfast and cakes by day and stone-baked pizzas in the evenings. And on the edge of the village at The Croft, Billy's opened in May 2024 — named for the late William Barr, whose family have run the site for over seventy years — where chef Joe Daly cooks locally sourced dinners that have already earned a Good Food Guide listing.

Village shops and Beatrix Potter

For a village this size the food shopping is faintly ridiculous. The Honeypot, a deli in a seventeenth-century building that has sold food for over a hundred years, is run by Fiona Wilson and family and stocks fifty types of honey and forty cheeses, with a takeaway hatch for sausage rolls and coffee. A few steps away is the Hawkshead Relish Company shop, in the very café where Mark and Maria Whitehead invented their chutneys in 1999 to serve with meals. When the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak emptied the village and nearly finished the café, they pivoted to selling the preserves instead. Production now happens in a Grade I listed sixteenth-century barn a mile away on Esthwaite Water — around six thousand jars a day, stocked by Liberty and Harvey Nichols, with more than sixty Great Taste Awards and an MBE for Maria. Their daughter Abbie still works in the village shop, where there is a daily tasting table.

Grasmere Gingerbread opened its second-ever shop here in June 2023, in the Grade II listed Corner Shop on Main Street, selling over a hundred ginger-themed things, including an exclusive gingerbread ice cream and, from November to March, hot ginger wine. The Chocolate Factory runs children's workshops every hour — £15, forty-five minutes, three chocolate creations to take home along with the apron and the hairnet. Stewardsons has sold Barbour jackets and Hunter wellies for over forty years. Even the beer has form: Hawkshead Brewery was founded in a barn here in 2002 by Alex Brodie, who had just finished thirty years as a BBC foreign correspondent, though it outgrew the village and nothing is brewed in Hawkshead today. The working brewery is Cumbrian Ales at Old Hall on Esthwaite Water, which makes the Loweswater Gold on the King's Arms bar.

The Beatrix Potter connection is handled with unusual restraint. The seventeenth-century building on Main Street that was the office of William Heelis — the solicitor who handled Potter's purchase of Hill Top in 1905 and married her in 1913 — spent decades as the National Trust's Beatrix Potter Gallery. The gallery closed for good in 2022, and in 2025 the Trust reopened the building as Tabitha Twitchit's, a second-hand bookshop named after Potter's cat character, who keeps a shop in Hawkshead in the tales. Hill Top itself is two miles south at Near Sawrey, open daily with timed-entry tickets released every Thursday, two weeks ahead — book if you're coming in season. Next door to it, the Tower Bank Arms appears in the illustrations of The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck and now pours up to five handpumps of Cumbrian ale. At Far Sawrey, the Cuckoo Brow Inn's house policy welcomes muddy boots, wet dogs and children, in that order.

Walks through the fells and village history

The walking starts at the door. Latterbarrow, the village's own summit at 245 metres, is topped by a tall stone obelisk visible from the streets below; Wainwright gave the hill its own chapter and declined to speculate on what the obelisk is for. The circuit from the car park is about four and a half miles, two to two and a half hours, steep and stone-pitched near the top. Tarn Hows, two and a quarter miles away, is the easy family classic: a level 1.8-mile gravel circuit around the tarn, fine for pushchairs and wheelchairs, with all-terrain Tramper scooters lent by the National Trust if you book two days ahead. A footpath from the church reaches the shore of Esthwaite Water in half an hour — the lake is a private trout fishery, so there is no shoreline circuit, but you can hire a boat (£55 for one person, £80 for two) and take an osprey safari; it is one of the most reliable places in the Lakes to watch ospreys fishing. Above the Windermere ferry, the ruined 1790s Claife Viewing Station once glazed its windows in coloured panes so Georgian tourists could see the lake in yellow for summer, light blue for winter and lilac for a thunderstorm; the restored platform has the coloured panels back. Claife Heights is also home to the Claife Crier, a wailing monk said to be the only ghost named on an Ordnance Survey map. Grizedale Forest, ten minutes' drive, has been a sculpture forest since 1977, with ten waymarked walking trails, nine cycle routes, a Gruffalo trail and three Go Ape courses. The Old Man of Coniston is fifteen minutes away when you want a proper mountain. Back in the village, the recreation ground has a playground, tennis courts and crown green bowling, ten minutes' walk from the Square.

The history you can mostly read off the buildings. The name is Norse — Haukr's sætr, the summer pasture of a settler called Haukr — and has nothing to do with birds of prey. The village missed the Domesday Book entirely; the surveyors swept these fells into one composite manor and did not itemise them. From around 1200 until 1537 the monks of Furness Abbey ran the place, and their Herdwick wool made it a market town — James I granted the charter in 1606. When machinery killed the wool market, the village simply stopped growing, which is why the seventeenth century is still standing. Wordsworth Street was once nicknamed Leather, Rag and Putty Street, after the tanners, weavers and carpenters who worked it. Wordsworth himself was a pupil at the grammar school from 1779 to 1787, boarding with Ann Tyson, whose cottage still stands; the school closed in 1909 with six pupils and is now a museum, where his name, carved into a desk, sits under glass, and children can dress up and write with quill pens in the old schoolroom. Above it all is St Michael and All Angels, Grade I listed, with massive round arcade piers that have no capitals and no bases, and painted scripture sentences from 1680 on the walls. Wordsworth remembered it in The Prelude: "I saw the snow-white church upon her hill / Sit like a thronèd Lady." The whitewash was stripped in the 1875 restoration, so the grey church you will see is not the one he did.

Ways in and the medieval courthouse

There is no railway and never was. The 505 bus — the Coniston Rambler — runs to Ambleside and Coniston in about twenty minutes each way, frequently from Easter to November, and the classic approach is still the Windermere ferry (ten minutes, £8 a car, every twenty minutes or so) and the road through the Sawreys, exactly as the Victorians did it.

On a Tuesday in August the Agricultural Show, founded in 1875 and past its 150th year, fills a field at Hawkshead Hall Farm with Herdwicks, heavy horses and terrier racing; Beatrix Potter once served as its president. At Easter the village bakes Hawkshead Whigs, its own caraway-seed bread. And the fifteenth-century courthouse on the edge of the village — the last surviving piece of Furness Abbey's manor — is free to visit, but the door is kept locked. You collect the key from the National Trust shop in the Square, let yourself in, and drop it back when you are done.