The Farmers Arms is the village's only pub, and it knows it. Ramblers coming off the Cumbria Way pile in alongside the residents of the local B&Bs, and the food changes day to day — steak and ale pie one afternoon, lamb curry or beef lasagne the next, Cumberland sausages, burgers, fish. Two regular ales, both from Jennings over in Cockermouth. Dogs are welcome throughout, there's a beer garden round the back, and the current landlords, Charlie and Tom, took the place on after its future looked shaky in early 2022. One reviewer did once complain of being ignored at the bar for two minutes while the landlord finished a conversation about gaming, which is the sort of thing that happens in a pub with only one bar.
For somewhere this small — 560 people, about a hundred acres of lanes on the northwest shore of Derwentwater — Portinscale is well supplied with tearooms. Local guides count three. The Chalet does breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea; the Dandelion is a café; and down at Nichol End Marine, the lakeside café bakes scones on the premises every day and describes them as famously huge, which for once is a claim you can test in person. There are hot outdoor showers there too, for the people who've been out on the water.
The water is much of the point. Two marinas sit just south of the village — Derwentwater Marina and Nichol End — and between them you can hire paddleboards, kayaks, canoes, pedalos, dinghies, rowing boats and windsurfers, or take an RYA-certified sailing course. The Keswick Launch stops at Nichol End landing stage on its circular cruise of the lake.
To get to Keswick you cross the Derwent on a pedestrian suspension bridge, fifteen level minutes over fields known as the Howrahs. The name was traced by one historian to Edward Stephenson, an East India Company man with a connection to the Howrah district of Calcutta, which is a long way for a Cumbrian field to have come.
Walkers use the village as a start line. Catbells rises almost from the doorstep — an easy path with a bit of a scramble at the top — and Causey Pike, the Coledale Horseshoe and the Newlands Round all set off from here.
Beatrix Potter spent ten summers at Lingholm, on the estate just outside the village, between 1885 and 1907. The kitchen gardens became Mr McGregor's garden in Peter Rabbit; the red squirrels in the woods became Squirrel Nutkin; and St Herbert's Island, out on the lake, turns up in her illustrations as Owl Island. The Lingholm Kitchen café now looks over the walled garden through a hundred-foot glass wall.
The village has no church of its own, no railway, and no through road since the 1960s bypass. The medieval Long Bridge, unusual for having two arches, was saved from a 1911 council demolition scheme by Hardwicke Rawnsley of the National Trust, only to be finished off by floods in 1954.
The name, incidentally, comes from Old English and Old Norse and means, more or less, the harlot's hut.
