Kendal

Most people drive straight through Kendal on the way to somewhere prettier, and I understand the instinct because the town itself is built from a dense, businesslike grey limestone that photographs less romantically than the whitewashed cottages further into the national park. But I spent two nights here and came away thinking Kendal is the most honest town in Cumbria — it was a working wool town for centuries, its motto is literally “Wool is my bread,” and it has never bothered dressing itself up as a tourist attraction. It just happens to sit at the gateway to the Lakes, so tourists pass through it anyway.

The town’s famous export is Kendal mint cake, the dense, almost aggressively sweet peppermint block that has fuelled English mountaineering expeditions since it was reportedly carried up Everest by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953. I bought a bar from Romney’s, one of the old manufacturers still making it by hand near the town centre, and ate a piece on a bench above the river feeling faintly ridiculous — it tastes like solidified toothpaste and sugar, and I could not stop eating it.

Kendal Castle sits in ruins on a hill above the town, unstaffed and free to wander, and it was the childhood home of Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and surviving wife — a fact I did not know before climbing up there and one that made the crumbling walls feel considerably more consequential. The view from the castle mound takes in the whole huddled grey town below and the fells starting to rise beyond it, a genuinely good vantage point that most day-trippers to the Lakes never bother to find. The town’s narrow, hidden “yards” — medieval alleyways running between the main streets, over a hundred of them once — are also worth getting lost in; several now house small galleries and workshops, including the excellent Abbot Hall art gallery.

When to go: Any time, honestly — Kendal doesn’t have a peak season the way the lakeside villages do, which is part of its appeal. Saturday brings a proper street market to the town centre.