Kentmere Hall sits at the head of the valley, a fourteenth-century pele tower bolted onto a farmhouse. It's private, so you look at it from the footpath rather than the doorstep, but there's plenty to look at. Pele towers were built to keep people and livestock safe when the Scottish border was a matter of opinion, which is a lot of stone wall for a place this quiet.
The valley itself runs north from Staveley and then simply stops. There is no through road. The single-track lane climbs about four miles from the A591, and where the tarmac gives up, the open fell begins. This is the first thing to understand about staying here: you arrive on purpose. Nobody passes through Kentmere on the way to somewhere else, because there is no somewhere else to be on the way to.
What the valley has instead is a ridge. The Kentmere Horseshoe is a twelve-mile circuit over Yoke, Ill Bell, Harter Fell at 778 metres and Kentmere Pike at 730, and it is one of the finest ridge walks in the eastern Lake District. You do the whole thing in a day if the weather holds, and you sit in a car park at the bottom regretting it if it doesn't.
For a gentler day there's the reservoir circuit — around six and a half miles up to Kentmere Reservoir and back past the church. The reservoir was built in 1848, not for drinking water but to regulate the River Kent so the mills downstream at Staveley kept turning. The river rises on the fell just above it.
St Cuthbert's Church stands on the reservoir route. It was largely rebuilt in 1866, though some of the roof beams go back to the sixteenth century. Inside there's a memorial to Bernard Gilpin, who was born in Kentmere in 1517 and became known as the Apostle of the North.
Gilpin was a Protestant reformer and Archdeacon of Durham who spent his life walking the remote parishes of the north, distributing food and teaching where nobody else bothered to go. His contemporaries called him the greatest clergyman of the age in England. He was offered the Bishopric of Carlisle and turned it down. A valley that ends at a dead end produced one of the most admired religious figures of Elizabethan England, which is a fact you can carry up the hill with you.
There's no pub in the valley and no shop. The nearest of either is back at Staveley, four miles south, where the Eagle & Child Inn does the job; the Watermill Inn at Ings is another mile beyond that. There's no railway station and no bus. You bring a car, or you walk, and both feel about right for the place.
In the evening the light comes off the fells and down the length of the valley, and there is nothing to hear but water and sheep.
