Wray Castle stands in a hundred acres of woodland above the western shore of Windermere, and it is not really a castle. A retired Liverpool surgeon named James Dawson built it in 1840 as a mock-Gothic house, using the fortune his wife Margaret Preston had inherited from her gin-distilling father. When it was finished, people thought it ugly. The Dawsons seem to have shared the view, because they spent very little time there, and the castle and its church were sold after Dawson's death.
The National Trust owns it now, gifted in 1929. You can walk the grounds and follow the waymarked paths through the woods, castle and all.
Wray itself is barely a village. It is a scattered hamlet split between High Wray and Low Wray, three miles from Ambleside, with no pub, no shop, and no through road along this stretch of the shore. The nearest pubs and shops are a couple of miles off, in Hawkshead or Ambleside. What it has instead is the water. The lakeshore path runs from Low Wray south to the ferry and north past the castle towards Ambleside, through woodland and parkland, with the islands of Windermere out on the lake.
Partway along stands Claife Viewing Station, a Gothic folly from the 1790s, now owned by the National Trust, built for tourists to stop and take in the view.
Above Low Wray, Blelham Tarn sits quiet in the woods — small, secluded, and easy to have to yourself.
Getting here takes some doing. There is no railway and no regular bus. You come by car on the B5286 between Ambleside and Hawkshead, or you take the Windermere ferry from Bowness and drive up the western shore.
The castle has one more claim on it. In 1882 a family rented the place for the summer and brought their sixteen-year-old daughter. Beatrix Potter spent her first Lake District holiday at Wray, started sketching, and met Hardwicke Rawnsley, the vicar of Wray Church, who became her mentor and later helped get The Tale of Peter Rabbit into print.
Rawnsley had been vicar here since 1877. Troubled by industry creeping into the countryside, he co-founded the National Trust in 1895 with Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter. The Trust now owns great swathes of the Lake District, including the castle where one of its founders once preached.
St Margaret's Church, which Dawson built around the same time as the castle and in the same Gothic manner, was put up to serve the castle's family and employees. Its tower was designed to echo the house on the hill.
The Low Wray campsite sits on the wooded lakeshore, close enough to the water that you fall asleep to the sound of it.
