Watendlath Tarn sits at the centre of the hamlet, seven acres of water seventeen metres deep, and everything else here — the farm buildings, the car park, the handful of paths — arranges itself around it. There is no shop, no church, no pub, and no bus. What there is, is a tarn and a tearoom, at 263 metres above Borrowdale, with fells on every side.
The whole place belongs to the National Trust. Not most of it — all of it. The farm buildings, the land, and the tarn itself, which was given to the Trust by Princess Louise, Queen Victoria's daughter, in memory of her brother King Edward VII. It is one of the few places you can visit where the water has been formally donated.
The tearoom is Caffle House, in one of the historic Trust farm buildings, and for most visitors it is the focal point of the hamlet. It does hot drinks, scones, cream teas, cakes, and light lunches, and it is busy with walkers and day-trippers who have made the drive up. The drive up is part of the appeal.
That road is a narrow single-track lane off the B5289, and it is one of the most scenic approaches in the Lake District. It passes Ashness Bridge, a packhorse bridge that has been called "perhaps the most photographed packhorse bridge in England," and then Surprise View, a viewpoint with a panorama over Derwentwater that earns the name. By the time you reach the car park — pay and display, limited spaces — you have already seen most of what people come for.
The walking justifies the rest. A footpath drops from the hamlet down into Borrowdale, reaching Rosthwaite in a mile and a half through high country. Above the tarn, High Tove and Armboth Fell offer open moorland walking, the kind where you don't meet many people. The hamlet is perched between the Borrowdale and Thirlmere valleys, which is a good position for going in either direction on foot.
The history is quiet and old. Watendlath was owned by Furness Abbey, and Cistercian monks farmed the remote valley — the name comes from Old Norse, "vatn-endih-hlada," meaning "water-end barn," which is more or less an exact description of the place even now. The valley later found its way into literature: Sir Hugh Walpole set part of his "Rogue Herries" series here in the early 1930s, and "Judith Paris" and "The Fortress" brought a wave of literary tourists up the single-track road.
There is no railway and no regular bus, so you arrive by car or you arrive on foot from Borrowdale. Either way you end up at the same tarn, in front of the same tearoom, watching the same walkers arrive for a scone before heading back down the hill.
