Patterdale

Inn life and valley essentials

A well-behaved dog at the White Lion Inn can expect a towel at the door, biscuits at the bar, a bed in the room, and — if it keeps this up — a sausage or two at breakfast. The humans do reasonably well too. The White Lion has been feeding travellers since the early 1800s, and a photograph from around 1900 shows a fully loaded horse-drawn coach squeezing past the narrow pinch in the road directly outside, because this inn has always been the choke-point of the valley. Inside there is a stone-flagged bar, a real fire, and two handpumps that rotate through Lakeland beers, typically Hawkshead Bitter and Wainwright. The menu is steak and ale pie, Cumberland sausage, mac and cheese, belly pork, fish and chips — filling and wholesome, deliberately not gastro. It changed hands and had a refurbishment around 2023, and it fills up nightly with Coast to Coast walkers, because Patterdale is where Wainwright's route comes down off the fells at the end of day three. The story goes that Wordsworth was in this bar when news arrived that Nelson had died at Trafalgar. Nobody can prove it, but he was documented in Patterdale in early November 1805, which is exactly when the news reached Cumbria, so the story at least keeps honest time.

Patterdale sits at the southern end of Ullswater, where the A592 threads between Place Fell on one side and the Helvellyn range on the other, and Goldrill Beck runs along the valley floor. The parish counts around five hundred people, taking in Glenridding and Hartsop as well. There is no railway, and never was — the Victorian schemes to bring one were fought off, which is why the nearest station is Penrith North Lakes, about thirty minutes' drive. Wainwright made this his favourite valley precisely because it stayed relatively undisturbed. He had a point, and the practical consequence is that you should plan your shopping.

Because Patterdale no longer has a shop. The village store and post office closed when its owners, Gillian and Tom, retired after fifteen-odd years, and no buyer came forward. This matters more than most shop closures, and there is a slate plaque on the building to say why: in 1955 Alfred Wainwright walked in with copies of his newly printed *The Eastern Fells* and asked the owner, Mr Dawson, to stock them — making it the first shop ever to sell a Wainwright guide. The order for six was repeated within a week, to the relief of a man who owed his printer £900. The series went on to sell over two million copies. The nearest shop now is R&R The Corner Shop in Glenridding, under a mile up the road, run by Rob and Ruth, open from 7am and selling everything from newspapers to dog food.

Valley hospitality and local stories

The village's other eating and drinking arrangements hold up well. The Patterdale Hotel is the big one — the building dates back to 1626 — and its public bar, the Place Fell Inn, takes walk-ins with no booking. There is all-day food, live music on Wednesday and Saturday nights, and a beer garden at the front with fell views where the soup of the day comes with a crusty roll for £3.75. Dogs are welcome; the hotel keeps both dog-friendly and dog-free lounges, which is a level of diplomacy most establishments never attempt. In April 2026 the hotel was sold to Lake District Hotels, the Graves family group, who have owned the Inn on the Lake at Glenridding since 2000 — so both ends of the valley's hotel bar scene now answer to the same family. They have announced extensive upgrade plans, so expect fresh paint.

Old Water View, the B&B on the banks of Goldrill Beck, has been taking guests since 1904 and has the best claim on the Wainwright trade: he stayed here repeatedly while devising the Coast to Coast, and the room he used is kept as the Place Fell room. Its Wainwright C2C Bar and riverside garden bar are open to non-residents, and pour Patterdale Ales — a house range brewed exclusively for them by Tirril Brewery — alongside more than twenty malt whiskies. The long-time host, Ian, has plaques on the wall for completing the Coast to Coast in both directions and Land's End to John o'Groats, so he can answer route questions with some authority.

Tirril, the local brewery connection, named one of its first beers Charles Gough's Old Faithful, and the story behind it belongs to this valley. In April 1805 Charles Gough, a young artist, set out from Patterdale to cross Striding Edge with his terrier, Foxie, and fell to his death. Three months later a shepherd heard barking near Red Tarn and found Foxie still guarding her master's body. Wordsworth wrote a poem about it. So did Walter Scott, independently. Landseer painted it. A memorial to Gough stands near Helvellyn's summit, and the beer commemorating him was the brewery's best-seller for eighteen years.

Farm stops and nearby choices

For daytime supplies there is the Side Farm Tea Room, at the working farm at the foot of Place Fell, serving coffee, homemade cakes and flapjack right on the lakeshore path — though its opening hours are best described as agricultural, and recent visitors have found it shut for spells, so treat it as a bonus rather than a plan. The farm also runs a first-come-first-served campsite from Easter to October, where reviewers keep naming Andrea as the friendly host. And between Patterdale and Hartsop, Crookabeck Farm Shop sells mohair socks, scarves, rugs and hand-dyed yarns. It is run by Mary, who bred Angora goats here for around thirty years; the goats have moved on, but the farm keeps Herdwick and Red Fox sheep, and the shop does a sock called the Patterdale Everyday.

Glenridding, a couple of minutes up the road, widens the options: Fellbites does breakfasts and evening meals — the ribeye and the sticky toffee pudding get named in reviews — and Helvellyn Country Kitchen, run by James and Abby, two chefs with Michelin-recognised kitchen backgrounds, sits at the top of the local Tripadvisor rankings. Both places were founded by former Patterdale valley hotel chefs, which tells you where the talent goes when it wants its own name over the door. Catstycam, the family outdoor shop established in 1985, will sort your boots.

Two more pubs guard the southern approaches. The Brotherswater Inn at the foot of the Kirkstone Pass shares its owners with the Sykeside campsite next door, opens every day of the year except Christmas Day, and does takeaway breakfast baps from 8am for campers and walkers. Dogs are allowed in the bar, the bunkhouse and even the shop, which may make it the most completely dog-friendly premises in the valley. And at the top of the pass, at about 1,500 feet, the Kirkstone Pass Inn — the highest inn in the Lake District, with building records back to 1496 — reopened in April 2026 after nearly five years closed, under Stu Taylor of Kirkby Lonsdale Brewery. Pie and peas, cask beer, a new copper-topped bar, and the original fixed seating retained. The resident ghost, Ruth Ray, who froze to death carrying her child over the pass, is said to appear as a warning of bad weather. In the Lake District this must keep her busy.

Fells, lake and church

The walking is the reason most people come, and Patterdale's front-door options are about as good as England offers. Helvellyn via Striding Edge is the famous one: roughly seven and a half miles for the full horseshoe, up the Grisedale lane to the Hole in the Wall, along the narrow rocky arête to the 950-metre summit, and down Swirral Edge past Red Tarn. Both edges are exposed scrambling, frequently underestimated, and serious in winter — the local mountain rescue team, founded in 1964 by the village GP, Dr James Ogilvie, now averages sixty call-outs a year, and Helvellyn is its patch. If you would rather keep your hands in your pockets, the alternative route up Grisedale past Grisedale Tarn climbs the same mountain by zig-zags instead of ridges. On the gentler end: Angle Tarn via Boredale Hause is a four-mile return to a tarn with islets, a red-deer and wild-camping favourite; the Place Fell circuit is eight and a half miles with a notoriously boggy summit; and Silver Point, an easy out-and-back along the shore from Side Farm, ends at a shingle beach where families swim and picnic.

The best low-level walk requires a boat. Take the Ullswater Steamer from Glenridding pier — half a mile from the village — to Howtown, then walk the six miles back to Patterdale along the lakeshore. Wainwright's verdict, in *The Far Eastern Fells*, was that this "is the most beautiful and rewarding walk in Lakeland." The steamers run 363 days a year, and the *Lady of the Lake*, launched in 1877 and shipped to the lake by rail in three sections, is believed to be the oldest working passenger vessel in the world. She has sunk twice and caught fire once, and still sails. St Patrick's Boat Landing, on the shore between Patterdale and Glenridding, hires rowing boats by the hour, and children paddle in Goldrill Beck. Ten minutes north, Aira Force drops sixty-five feet through National Trust woodland that remains one of England's last strongholds of red squirrels.

The history here runs deep and mostly without paperwork. Patterdale has no Domesday entry — in 1086 this end of the future Westmorland was effectively under Scottish control and never surveyed — so the village first appears in writing in a charter of 1348, as the Chapel of Patricksdale. The name is the point: this is St Patrick's dale, and by tradition the saint preached and baptised at the lake shore around 450 AD. An eighteenth-century well-house still stands beside the road at St Patrick's Well. The present church, Grade II listed and built in 1853 to Anthony Salvin's design for £1,485, holds an embroidered panel of the Good Shepherd stitched in 1938 by Ann Macbeth of the Glasgow School of Art, who lived here and worked the surrounding fells into the background. Its west altar came from St Martin-in-the-Fields in London and commemorates more than five hundred people killed in aircraft crashes on the Lakeland fells. Patterdale also once had kings: the Mounsey family held the hereditary title King of Patterdale after one of them led the dalesmen to Stybarrow Crag to repel Scottish raiders. The most memorable, John Mounsey, had £300 a year and dressed in rags and iron-shod clogs.

A valley shaped by tradition

The twentieth century kept things lively. In 1926 two aviators landed a biplane on Helvellyn's snowy summit and press-ganged a passing professor of Greek into witnessing the feat. In 1955 Donald Campbell drove Bluebird K7 to 202 mph on Ullswater, his first water speed record. And in 1962 Manchester tried to turn the lake into a reservoir; Lord Birkett talked the House of Lords out of it, died days later, and had a fell above the eastern shore renamed after him.

If you can, come on the Saturday of August Bank Holiday weekend, when Patterdale Dog Day takes over the King George V field — sheepdog trials against the Helvellyn backdrop, hound and terrier shows, shepherds' sticks, a fell race. It was founded in 1901 by three men who met at Grisedale Bridge, and the first year's £20 gate money was celebrated with whisky from the White Lion. One of the three was Joe Bowman, huntsman of the Ullswater Foxhounds for some forty-two years, who is credited with first breeding the Patterdale Terrier — the small black dog that carries this village's name around the world. Bowman died in 1940, aged ninety, and is buried in St Patrick's churchyard, a short walk from the bar where his terriers' descendants still get a sausage in the morning for behaving themselves.