The Moot Hall has a one-handed clock. It sits in the middle of Market Square like a building that wandered into the road and decided to stay, which is more or less what happened — the current structure dates from 1813, though there has been something on this spot since 1571, variously serving as courthouse, prison, market hall and museum. The ground floor is now the tourist information centre. Upstairs there is an art gallery. The clock still tells the time with a single hand, which in Keswick feels about right. Nobody here is in that much of a rush.
On Thursdays and Saturdays the market fills the square and spills down Main Street — around seventy stalls selling Cumbrian cheese, bread, local produce and handmade things. The Thursday market leans toward Made in Cumbria craft; Saturday is broader. If the wind gets up, the whole thing may not happen. The Keswick Market Facebook page gives day-of confirmation, which tells you something about the relationship between this town and the weather.
Bryson's bakery is on the square. They have been here since the late 1940s, when John Bryson came back from the war and started hand-baking bread from locally milled flour. The Lakeland Plum Bread is made to a recipe they will not share. The Borrowdale Tea Bread likewise. Booths supermarkets stock Bryson's products across the north of England, but the tea room above the shop is the thing — light meals through to full plates, and the kind of queue that suggests the locals haven't found anywhere better in seventy-five years.
Walk south from the square down Lake Road and you pass Fellpack, which opened in 2017 and describes itself as après fell-walking. The menu changes often and covers a range that would be ambitious in a city, let alone a town of 4,600 people: Indonesian lamb rendang, Keralan fish curry, pork belly with fennel and braised lentils. They call their dishes "fellpots." The sticky toffee pudding gets mentioned in nearly every review. A few doors further down, Morrels occupies a three-storey townhouse with views of Catbells from the dining room. The duck three ways — pan-fried breast, confit thigh, leg croquette — is the sort of dish that quietly justifies the walk down the hill. Sunday table d'hôte is three courses for under seventeen pounds.
Back up in the square, the Dog and Gun is the pub that most walking guides mention first. It is a Greene King house with no booking system — you turn up and wait, and on a Saturday in August you may wait for some time. The Hungarian goulash is the signature dish, a beef stew with dumplings and garlic bread that generates the kind of loyalty where people report eating it twice in one trip. Dogs are welcome without leads, and the staff sell treats and hand out poo bags, which is a level of preparedness that suggests they know their clientele. On Crosthwaite Road, the Pheasant Inn pours Jennings ales including their own Pheasant Ale and serves a fish pie described on TripAdvisor as "legendary," which is a word that gets overused but in this case appears to be earned through repetition rather than hyperbole. The free-range Cumberland sausage is worth noting. Dog treat donations go to Keswick Mountain Rescue.
For something less traditional, the Square Orange on St John's Street — known locally as the Squorange — does stone-baked pizza and European tapas in a small, bohemian room that does not take bookings and fills up fast. N'duja with rocket and burrata. Guest wines from family-run vineyards. Belgian and German beers alongside Cumbrian microbrewery output. Arrive before half twelve or accept your fate. Casa Bella on Main Street does Italian with an in-house gelato parlour — sixteen flavours, including Stilton, which is the sort of thing that either appeals to you or doesn't.
If you want a pint from someone who made it that morning, Keswick Brewing Company is a two-minute walk from the centre on Brewery Lane. Founded in 2006 on what is believed to be the site of the original Keswick Brewery that ceased trading in 1897. Thirst Rescue, their 3.8% golden ale, was created to raise money for the mountain rescue team. The Fox Tap bar sells up to six cask and four keg beers. Tours run twice daily, Tuesday to Saturday, and cost ten pounds including samples.
George Fisher, the outdoor shop on Borrowdale Road, has occupied its corner since 1957, when George Fisher opened a small shop while working as an instructor at the Ullswater Outward Bound School. The premises had been the Abraham Brothers' photographic studio since 1887 — the Abrahams were pioneer rock climbers and mountain photographers whose work helped invent the idea of the Lake District as a place people might want to visit. Fisher himself was a serious climber who led the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team for years and received an MBE in 1980. The boot-fitting service is still the reason many people make the trip — only staff who have completed the training programme are allowed to work in the Boot Room, which sounds like marketing until you discover your boots still fit painlessly at mile eleven.
Main Street is pedestrianised and overwhelmingly independent. There are chain outdoor shops — Cotswold, Mountain Warehouse — but they are outnumbered. Bookends is an independent bookshop that acts as official bookseller for the Words by the Water literary festival every March. The Makers Mill, in a renovated nineteenth-century building on the River Greta, houses working studios for furniture makers, ceramicists and textile artists around a shared gallery selling work from over thirty local makers. The Pencil Museum is on the site of the old Cumberland Pencil Company factory, where pencils were made from the 1830s until production moved to Workington in 2007. The world's longest pencil is here — 7.91 metres, just under 26 feet, weighing 446 kilograms. More interesting are the WW2 spy pencils: during the war, the factory made pencils under the Official Secrets Act containing a tightly rolled silk map of occupied Europe and an 8mm compass, intended for downed aircrews and escaping prisoners of war. About ten sets are believed to survive. One is on display.
The pencil industry exists because of the graphite. In the 1550s, a storm uprooted trees in the Seathwaite valley near Borrowdale and exposed a deposit of pure, solid graphite — the only one ever found anywhere in the world. Farmers used it to mark sheep. The Crown used it to line cannonball moulds. The mines were guarded and flooded between extractions to prevent theft. A cottage industry of pencil-making grew up around it, and by the 1830s Keswick had factories.
Copper came earlier, or at least more dramatically. In 1565, Elizabeth I sent around a hundred German miners from Augsburg to work the veins in the Newlands Valley. They named their richest mine God's Blessing — now known as Goldscope. In 1539 Keswick had been described as "a poor little market town." By 1599 it was "a town famous for copperworks." The Germans married local women. Keswick got self-sufficient copper and, presumably, better beer.
Cumberland was not part of England when the Domesday surveyors came through in 1086 — it was under the Kingdom of Strathclyde — so Keswick has no Domesday entry. The town's name means "cheese farm," from the Norse, which is either the least dramatic etymology in the Lake District or the most honest.
The lake is Derwentwater, sometimes called the Queen of the Lakes, and it is ten minutes on foot from the square. Friar's Crag is a rocky promontory jutting into the water where John Ruskin was taken by his nurse at the age of five. He later called it one of the three or four most beautiful views in Europe. There is a memorial stone. Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, vicar of nearby Crosthwaite for thirty-four years and co-founder of the National Trust, organised it. Rawnsley also helped a young Beatrix Potter get *The Tale of Peter Rabbit* published. He is buried in the churchyard at St Kentigern's, Crosthwaite, a few paces from Robert Southey, who was Poet Laureate for thirty years and lived at Greta Hall from 1803 until his death in 1843. Wordsworth wrote his epitaph. Coleridge had lived at Greta Hall first — he moved in during the summer of 1800 — but left, as Coleridge tended to.
The Keswick Launch runs a circular hop-on, hop-off service around Derwentwater with six stops, taking fifty minutes for the full loop. The stop at Hawse End is where most people begin the walk up Catbells. Wainwright called it "one of the great favourites, a family fell where grandmothers and infants can climb the heights together," and at 451 metres it is short enough to justify this, though the rocky scramble near the top keeps things interesting. From the summit, Derwentwater is directly below, Skiddaw rises to the north, and the Borrowdale valley stretches south. On a clear day you feel you can see most of the decisions you have ever made.
Latrigg, the fell directly behind the town, is even shorter — 368 metres — and Wainwright's verdict was characteristically blunt: "Anybody who cannot manage this short and simple climb is advised to give up the idea of becoming a fellwalker." The views over Keswick and the lake are disproportionate to the effort. Skiddaw, at 931 metres, is more serious — the fourth highest mountain in England — but the tourist route from Keswick is the most straightforward way up a Lake District three-thousander, wide-pathed and steady all the way.
Castlerigg Stone Circle is a mile and a half southeast of town, free to visit, and around five thousand years old. Thirty-eight stones in a rough circle, with a rectangular enclosure of ten smaller stones on one side — a feature found nowhere else. Keats visited and is thought to have drawn on it for *Hyperion*. The setting is the thing: fells on every side, sheep wandering through, no entrance fee, no gift shop, no audio guide. It just sits there, as it has since roughly 3200 BC, being older than the pyramids and not making a fuss about it.
The nearest railway station is Penrith, seventeen miles east on the West Coast Main Line. Keswick had its own station from 1865 until 1972, when Beeching's axe finally fell — the building is now part of the Keswick Country House Hotel, and the trackbed east of town is a flat, family-friendly walking and cycling path to Threlkeld. The X4 and X5 buses run from Penrith roughly every half hour and take forty minutes. By car, it is the M6 to Junction 40, then sixteen miles on the A66, which is a road that rewards patience and punishes tailgating in equal measure.
Theatre by the Lake, on the shore of Derwentwater, was opened by Judi Dench in 1999 and produces up to nine plays a year across two spaces. The Alhambra Cinema on St John's Street has been showing films since 1913, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating cinemas in the country. Between the two of them, wet evenings are well accounted for — and in Keswick, you will have wet evenings.
On Saturday mornings in the square, if you stand by the Moot Hall and look past the market stalls toward Skiddaw, you can watch the cloud descend and lift and descend again, and listen to a man selling cheese explain the difference between a young Cumbrian cheddar and a mature one to someone who did not ask. It is, in its way, everything you came for.
