Windermere

From Birthwaite to a railway town

The sign at Windermere station says "alight here for the lakes" and has done, in one form or another, since 20 April 1847, when the Kendal and Windermere Railway opened its terminus in a hamlet called Birthwaite. It is the last stop on the line. Beyond here the railway simply gives up, defeated by the same fells that defeated Wordsworth's campaign to stop it being built in the first place.

Step out of the station and you're on a steep Victorian high street that didn't exist two hundred years ago. The village was called Birthwaite then — a handful of farms in the township of Applethwaite, too small to appear on most maps. The railway company named their station after the lake a mile downhill, because "Birthwaite" didn't sell tickets. The hotels and boarding houses followed, then the villas, then the outdoor shops, and by the time anyone thought to object, the place had become Windermere and Birthwaite had been forgotten entirely. Windermere itself doesn't touch the water. That's Bowness, the older settlement, down the hill. This distinction matters to locals and to nobody else.

The first thing you'll notice is Booths. It sits right next to the station, built on the old goods yard, and it's a Booths, which means it stocks Cumberland sausage and Cartmel sticky toffee pudding and has a dedicated section for regionally brewed beer. Two hours' free parking. The second thing you'll notice is the outdoor gear shops. Freemans, at 9–11 Main Road, has been selling climbing harnesses, Rab jackets, and Osprey packs for over forty years. Mountain Warehouse is on Lake Road. There are at least three more within two hundred yards. The Lake District runs on walking boots and waterproofs, and Windermere is where you buy them.

Main Road drops south through the village and has the feel of a high street that exists entirely because of tourism but has been doing it long enough to have become genuine. Love The Lakes sells slate coasters and Herdwick sheep cushions, all made locally. The National Park Print Shop at number 22 does risograph and giclée prints from independent artists. There's a Co-op for the things Booths is too dignified to stock. Claytons the butcher, a family business since 1907, has recently closed — its premises are on the market — which tells you something about the economics of a village that gets several million visitors a year but still can't keep a butcher going.

Tables, taps and village character

For the size of the place, the food is remarkably good. Hooked, on Ellerthwaite Square, is a tiny seafood restaurant that has been changing its menu daily since 2010, depending on what comes in from Fleetwood and three other suppliers. The Morecambe Bay potted shrimps are a fixture. Beyond that, you might find king scallops with pea purée and Bury black pudding, monkfish rolled in Parma ham with creamed leeks, or whole rainbow trout baked in white wine and dill. It seats perhaps twenty people. Book ahead.

Francine's, at 27 Main Road, is a coffee house by day and a bistro by evening — Francine runs front of house, her husband Graeme cooks. The Good Food Guide called it "a rare commodity in touristy Windermere." The evening menu leans into seafood and European cooking: lobster thermidor, escargot in red wine, a dish called Pig on a Plate that involves belly pork, pig's cheek, black pudding, and pancetta on the same plate, which is commitment. The sticky toffee pudding is homemade. Expect to spend forty to fifty pounds a head. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

The Crafty Baa on Victoria Street won AA Pub of the Year for England in 2018–19, which would be a remarkable achievement for any pub and is especially so for one opened two years earlier by a couple who previously ran a window-cleaning business. Vincent and Lisa Gregg converted a second-hand bookshop using recycled materials — the bar is built from old pallet boxes — and the result sprawls across three floors of themed rooms. The original bar has over a hundred craft beers in the fridge including the world's two strongest (Snake Venom at 67.5% and Beithir Fire at 75%). The Pie & Pint next door does exactly what its name suggests: every cask ale comes with a free mini pork pie, which is a policy more pubs should adopt. Food across both is informal — baked camembert, scotch eggs, charcuterie boards, grilled sandwiches. Dogs are welcome.

The Elleray, on the corner of Cross Street and Victoria Street, is the other kind of pub entirely — a free house with a real fire, steak and ale pie, and a beer garden that locals describe as a sun-trap. Live music most weekends. Open mic on the first Tuesday of the month. It is the pub where the food is good value and nobody is trying to impress you, which is sometimes exactly what you want.

Coffee, old inns and first summits

Homeground does good coffee and is the sort of place where brunch occupies the whole morning.

Walk down the hill towards Bowness — about fifteen minutes on foot, consistently downhill, consistently uphill coming back — and you reach the Hole in t'Wall, properly called the New Hall Inn, which has been serving drinks since 1612 and is a Grade II listed building. The name comes from the blacksmith next door, who got tired of walking outside to collect his pint and knocked a hole through the wall so he could be served at his anvil. Thomas Longmire, a noted wrestler, was landlord between 1852 and 1862. Dickens drank here. It's a Robinsons house now, so Unicorn and Dizzy Blonde on cask, and the food is honest pub cooking — pies, jacket potatoes, a ploughman's big enough for two. Dogs are allowed on the terrace but not inside.

The walk everyone does first is Orrest Head, and they're right to. The path starts behind green railings on the A591 directly opposite the station — the signpost says twenty minutes, which is optimistic; allow thirty to forty. At the summit, 238 metres up, a slate diorama identifies everything you can see: the full eleven-mile length of Windermere below, the Langdale Pikes, Great Gable, Scafell Pike, the Fairfield ridge, and on a clear day, Morecambe Bay and the Pennines. The land was given to the public in 1902 by Arthur Henry Heywood. It was the first fell Alfred Wainwright ever climbed. He was twenty-three, up from Blackburn in 1930 on a week's holiday with his cousin Eric Beardsall, and when he reached the top he saw what he later described as "a moment of magic, a revelation so unexpected that I stood transfixed, unable to believe my eyes." He spent the next fifty years writing guidebooks to these hills.

School Knott, at 230 metres, is a quieter alternative that gives you views of four separate stretches of Windermere from an angle most visitors never see. You can reach it from Crook Road near the golf club and be up and back within two hours. Brant Fell, above Bowness, is another short climb — steep in places, sometimes muddy — with the lake laid out below you. The three can be linked into a circuit of perhaps three hours that keeps you on high ground with water in sight for most of it. None of these are serious hills. All of them feel like serious hills because of what you can see from the top.

Lake access, Arts and Crafts, and churches

For the lake itself, Millerground is the easiest access from the village. Walk downhill along Rayrigg Road to a flat, paved path through parkland that leads to a pebble shore with wooden jetties and shallow wading. On summer mornings, swimmers head for Buoy 13 — a green floating barrel about three hundred metres offshore that has become the local benchmark for a proper wild swim. The water is cold. It is always cold. Even in August, it is cold. Check the algae notices before letting dogs in.

Windermere Lake Cruises run from Bowness pier year-round. The Red route goes north to Ambleside; the Yellow route goes south to Lakeside at Newby Bridge. An Islands cruise loops through the central section — the lake has eighteen islands — with commentary. A Freedom of the Lake ticket costs thirty-two pounds and covers everything for twenty-four hours. The lake is the largest in England: eleven miles long, a mile wide at its broadest, 219 feet at its deepest, the bed well below sea level.

Between Windermere and Bowness, just off the lakeside road, is Blackwell. Built in 1898–1900 by M.H. Baillie Scott as a holiday home for a Manchester brewer, it is one of England's most important Arts and Crafts houses — Grade I listed, now open to the public as a gallery. You can walk to it from Bowness in twenty minutes and spend an hour inside without seeing everything.

St Mary's Church, on the Ambleside Road, was built in 1847–48 — the same years the railway arrived — as a proprietary chapel for a Liverpool clergyman named Addison, who saw a growing congregation where previously there hadn't been one. It is Grade II listed. Paley and Austin, the Lancaster architects, added the central tower in 1881. St Martin's, down in Bowness, is the older church by several centuries: Grade I listed, present on the site since at least 1203, burned down in 1480, rebuilt and consecrated three years later. The east window contains medieval stained glass dating to around 1260, brought from Cartmel Priory, including a coat of arms claimed as belonging to an ancestor of George Washington. Pevsner called the interior "a strange sight" because it is constructed entirely in thickly plastered, white-painted rubble.

The railway argument and the town today

Wordsworth published his sonnet against the railway in the Morning Post on 16 October 1844. "Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?" he asked. The railway came anyway. He had been dead two years by the time the excursion trains started running.

The train to the West Coast Main Line takes twenty minutes to Oxenholme, where you can connect to London, Manchester, Edinburgh, or Glasgow. The 555 bus runs through the village to Ambleside, Grasmere, and on to Keswick, roughly half-hourly in summer, which makes Windermere a reasonable base for the central Lakes without needing a car. The A591 passes through and is the road that gets congested on bank holiday weekends.

The combined parish had a population of 7,676 at the last census, looked after by twenty unpaid councillors. It is a small town that handles a very large number of visitors, and it does so without losing its shape. The outdoor shops open early. The pubs fill up by evening. The train arrives, and people step out onto the platform, and some of them walk up Orrest Head, and a few of them — like Wainwright — never quite get over what they see from the top.