Coniston Water narrows to its foot at Nibthwaite, and the lake more or less ends where the hamlet begins. This is the southern tip, the quiet end, where the water drains into the Crake and heads off through the valley toward Lowick and the coast. Low Nibthwaite sits fifteen minutes' walk from the shore, two minutes by car.
There is no pub here, no church, and no shop. The nearest pint is about a mile away; for anything more than that you go to Coniston village, six miles north, which has the main pubs and restaurants for the area, or to Greenodd four miles off, which has a butcher and a village shop. This is not a place that provisions you. It is a place you provision yourself for.
Getting here confirms as much. There is no railway and no regular bus. You come by car, either on the minor road from Lowick Bridge or the A5084 down from Ulverston, and then the road runs out and the walking starts.
What the hamlet has instead is the eastern shore of Coniston Water, and that turns out to be enough. The path along the eastern side runs flat and largely car-free, which the western shore cannot claim — the A5084 runs down that side. So you walk north from the hamlet with the lake on your left and, for the most part, nothing coming the other way.
Higher up there is Beacon Tarn, a small upland tarn on the fells above the village, usually empty of people. And from this area the southern ridge climbs to Coniston Old Man, 803 metres, by way of Brow Pike.
That last route has a passenger in its history. Arthur Ransome's father carried the infant Arthur to the summit of the Old Man, which is one way to begin a lifelong attachment to a place. Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons books between 1930 and 1947, spent his childhood summers here at the foot of the lake, sailing with local children, and the whole of it — the water, the fells, the charcoal burners, the boat builders and farmers — went into the stories. He is buried in the churchyard at Rusland.
The charcoal is real too. The woods around Nibthwaite fed the Furness iron furnaces from the sixteenth century, and the burning platforms, the pitsteads, are still there in the coppice if you know to look down for them. The industry is gone; the ground it stood on is not.
The rest is wood and pasture. The country here is quietly pastoral, the fells rising behind and the Crake pulling the lake southward toward Lowick and the coast. For a church you go to Lowick or back up to Coniston. It leaves Nibthwaite itself with the shore, the tarn, the woods, and a hamlet that has decided, on the whole, to stay small.
