The Royal Hotel sits in Dockray, a scatter of houses on a minor road above the gorge of Aira Beck, and it has been serving drinks there for over five hundred years. It is a free house, CAMRA-listed, and the sort of place that keeps small Cumbrian breweries in business — Keswick, Tirril, Coniston and Cumbrian Legendary Ales all turn up on the taps depending on the week. The menu is a blackboard that changes with what's available: slow-braised lamb shanks, fresh Cumbrian trout, homemade shortcrust pies, and wild venison shot in Matterdale forest, which is about as short a supply chain as venison gets.
Across the road there's a signposted footpath to Aira Force. It's 1.7km away, which makes the pub the obvious start or finish to the walk, and plenty of Ullswater walkers treat it as exactly that.
Aira Force is a twenty-metre waterfall on Aira Beck, and one of the most visited in the Lake District. The beck runs down through a wooded gorge toward Ullswater, and the National Trust keeps a car park and a café down at the lake shore. You can stand at the falls for a while and understand why people keep coming back to look at falling water.
Above the falls rises Gowbarrow Fell, 481 metres, and this is the one that matters. In April 1802, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy walked here from Eusemere near Pooley Bridge and found the lakeside daffodils. Dorothy wrote in her journal about "a long belt" of them. Two years later William used the memory to write "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," which is now one of the most celebrated poems in the language. The wild daffodils still flower at Gowbarrow every April, which is a rare case of a literary landmark keeping its side of the bargain.
Dockray is also a starting point for the Ullswater Way, a twenty-mile circular around the lake. You can go clockwise over Gowbarrow or anti-clockwise toward Glenridding. For something shorter and steeper, Great Mell Fell (537m) rises above Matterdale End as a rounded, isolated summit — a brief walk that pays out more than it asks.
Matterdale Church, dedicated to All Saints, is worth the detour. The parish grew out of a genuine grievance: in 1566 the residents petitioned the Bishop of Carlisle because Matterdale lay within Greystoke parish, and the journey for baptisms, marriages and funerals was simply too far. They got their chapel licensed in 1573. The building was thatched until 1848, when someone finally added a tower, and though the present stone church dates to 1881, the original sixteenth-century roof timbers are still up there holding the place together. It's Grade II* listed and one of the more isolated medieval parish churches in Cumbria.
Don't come expecting to buy anything. There are no shops in Matterdale or Dockray — the nearest are at Pooley Bridge or Penrith. There's no railway and no regular bus either, so you'll arrive by car, either from Penrith via Greystoke or up the minor fell roads from the Ullswater valley.
Then the daffodils, still coming up every April, doing what they were written about doing.
