The Scafell Hotel has a side entrance for people who have been walking all day and don't want to bring the fells inside with them. It leads to the Riverside Bar, where walkers and dogs are welcome and the shelf behind the counter holds over sixty malt whiskies. CAMRA lists it. There are two regular ales and two that change, with Tirril the name that comes round most often.
The bar keeps things simple — light meals and snacks — but the restaurant does not. The kitchen under head chef Chris runs a modern British à la carte, and if you're staying long enough to make an evening of it, a ten-course tasting menu that works its way through game, meat and fish. That is a lot of courses for a village at the bottom of a Cumbrian valley.
The other place to eat is the Flock-In, a walkers' café doing light lunches and cakes. Between the two you have somewhere for a slice after a wet morning and somewhere for sixty whiskies after a long one, which covers most of what a valley like this asks for.
Rosthwaite sits in central Borrowdale, six miles south of Keswick. The valley, narrow further north, widens here into a flat flood plain, and the River Derwent meanders across it with no particular hurry. Glaramara stands over it at 783 metres. High Spy and Eagle Crag close in the sides. Stonethwaite Beck comes in from the east.
That east is where the flattest walk starts. Follow the beck a short way and you're in the Stonethwaite valley, which opens quietly into Langstrath — level ground and steep sides, the sort of walk you do when your legs have had enough of climbing.
When they haven't, the fells are all around. Eagle Crag and High Spy rise straight off Borrowdale. Haystacks, at 597 metres, is usually done from Honister, but Rosthwaite works as an alternative base for it via Gillercomb. The Coast to Coast passes through the village, so on any given morning some of the people at breakfast are a fortnight into a walk across England and some have arrived by car for the afternoon.
There is no church here. The nearest are at Grange-in-Borrowdale and Stonethwaite, both a walk away, which tells you how small Rosthwaite is and always has been.
It was, though, one of the first settlements in Borrowdale to take up tourism, back in the early nineteenth century, on the strength of the valley's looks and how easily you could reach it from Keswick. The Scafell's main house went up in 1816–17, built by Mary Barker, and was already trading under its present name by 1875 — described then as "romantically situate among the hills." It has been one of Borrowdale's principal places to stay for two hundred years.
Just down the valley are the Borrowdale Yews, the ancient trees Wordsworth put in a poem in 1803 — "those fraternal Four of Borrowdale, joined in one solemn and capacious grove."
Getting here means the B5289 from Keswick, or the seasonal 78/79 Borrowdale Rambler, which stops in the village on its way to Seatoller. There is no railway, and there never was. You come in past the yews and the river, and the valley closes behind you.
