Ullswater
"Ullswater bends itself in three directions and makes you work to see all of it — which is the point."
I came around the corner on the A592 south of Pooley Bridge and the lake appeared below me in the morning light — a long curve of grey-silver water bending away between wooded headlands, with Place Fell rising dark and steep on the far shore and the white specks of the Ullswater Steamers making their slow crossing at the far end. I pulled over at the layby where everyone pulls over because it would be eccentric not to, and I stood there for a few minutes with the engine off, listening to the wind in the bracken above the road. This is Ullswater’s first move: to stop you before you are properly ready.
The lake is often called the most beautiful in the Lake District, which is a meaningful title given the competition. What earns it is the bends: Ullswater curves three times as it extends south and west, which means it never shows you the whole seven and a half miles at once. Each curve reveals a new arrangement of water and fell and sky, and the lake changes register at each bend — broad and open near Pooley Bridge in the north, enclosed and dramatic in the southern reach near Patterdale where Helvellyn and Striding Edge dominate the skyline.
Wordsworth’s daffodils are here, or their descendants. The poem — “I wandered lonely as a cloud” — was inspired by a walk he and Dorothy took along the western shore of Ullswater in April 1802, when they came upon a belt of wild daffodils running along the shoreline below Gowbarrow Fell. The daffodils still grow there, in the woodland above the lakeside path between Glencoyne Bay and Aira Force, and in March and April the path runs through them and they are genuinely, completely beautiful. The place is called Gowbarrow Park and it does not look like a park. It looks like a hillside of ancient oak and juniper with the lake below and a waterfall at the end. Aira Force, the waterfall, drops twenty metres into a rocky gorge covered in ferns and moss, and the wooden bridges spanning the gorge above and below the falls let you watch the water from several angles.
The Ullswater Steamers — Victorian steam vessels, converted to diesel but retaining their original hulls and saloon fittings — run between Pooley Bridge, Howtown, and Glenridding throughout the year with reduced winter services. The Howtown round walk is one of the classic Lake District half-days: take the steamer south to Howtown, walk the six-mile lakeshore path back to Glenridding through oak woodland and past Hallin Fell, arriving at the pier in time for a pint at the Travellers Rest. The path stays close to the water, climbing briefly over headlands and then dropping back to the shore, and the views across the lake to Place Fell opposite change at every angle.
Patterdale, the village at the southern end, is the starting point for the Helvellyn ascent via Striding Edge — the most dramatic ridge walk in England, a narrow spine of rock between two glacial corries that drops sheer on both sides before reaching the flat summit plateau. I did it in October on a day when cloud was banking over the summit but the ridge itself was clear. The eastern corrie holds Red Tarn, a perfect circle of dark water a hundred metres below, and looking down to it from the ridge with the wind coming over the col felt exactly as serious as the guidebooks suggest. This is not a fell walk. This is something slightly more than a fell walk.
When to go: March and April for the daffodils at Gowbarrow — they peak in the second and third weeks of April most years. September for the Helvellyn walks in clear autumn light before the mist closes in. The Ullswater Steamers run a Christmas Day service which is apparently an excellent way to spend Christmas Day if you are the kind of person who thinks so.