Two Michelin Keys · Crook
Things to do near Gilpin Hotel & Lake House —
a local guide
Off the main road at Crook — deliberately hard to stumble across.
Two Michelin Keys · Crook
Off the main road at Crook — deliberately hard to stumble across.
Michelin
Two Keysand a Star for SOURCE
Windermere
10–12 minby car
Nearest pickup
Windermerestation
Private tour
£459per group, from the hotel
Cartmel
½ hoursouth
The setting
Quietfarmland, off the A591
A private tour from Gilpin
Book any of our tours as a private tour, collected from the hotel, for your party alone — or have a bespoke tour planned around your stay.
Book a private tour Plan a bespoke tourPrivate from £459 per group · small-group tours from £79 per person
You leave the motorway world at the big roundabout north of Kendal, and the countdown starts. Five miles of the B5284 — a hedged, wandering lane that was never built for hurrying — and with every one of them the twenty-first century thins out a little more. Drystone walls. Sheep looking up to consider you. A beck flickering alongside the road and gone again. By the time the sign appears and the drive curls into the gardens, your shoulders have dropped an inch without asking permission, and you’ve learned the first thing about Gilpin: the approach isn’t an obstacle on the way to the hotel. It’s the overture.
That beck you crossed, by the way, is very likely the River Gilpin itself, only a few fields old — the hotel’s name has a sword, a legendary boar and eight centuries of coming-and-going in it, and we’ve written the whole story. Save it for your first evening; it’s ten minutes very well spent.
Gilpin holds two Michelin Keys, and its restaurant SOURCE holds a Michelin Star. The two are awarded independently of each other. How to plan a day around a table here, and see the Michelin Collection for the full picture across the county.
Don’t unpack properly. Leave the cases half-open, change your shoes, and go out into the gardens while the drive is still in your legs — because the grounds here are extensive, genuinely worth walking rather than glancing at, and the first hour in them recalibrates you faster than anything indoors can. Stand still somewhere among the trees and take an inventory of what you can hear. Wood pigeons. Water moving somewhere. Wind doing something unhurried in the branches. That’s the full list, and it’s the whole reason you’re here.
It’s also worth being honest with yourself about what you haven’t booked: there is no lake at the end of the lawn, and the fells are a drive away. But that isn’t an accident you’ve stumbled into — the person who built this house in 1901 chose this fold of farmland over a lakeside plot on purpose, and in a Lake District August, when every shoreline in the national park is queueing for ice cream, quiet is by some distance the scarcer commodity. You’ve booked the rare one.
Almost every hotel in this part of the Lakes sits on or just off the main Windermere–Ambleside road, which in season carries a great deal of slow traffic. Gilpin does not. The practical result is that you sleep in silence and start the day without queueing — and if someone else is driving you out for the day, you skip the worst of it entirely.
Windermere and Bowness are ten to fifteen minutes west for the station, the piers and the boats. Kendal is a similar distance south-east — a proper Cumbrian market town with a good museum, the Brewery arts centre and rather better everyday shopping than the lakeside villages. Levens Hall and Sizergh Castle are both a short drive south, and both are worth a half-day: Levens for the extraordinary seventeenth-century topiary garden, Sizergh for the house, the limestone garden and the wildlife. One practical note worth booking around: Levens Hall closes for the season each year in early October, while Sizergh's garden stays open through autumn and into winter — so for a stay later in the year, Sizergh is the safer half-day to plan for. And half an hour south sits Cartmel — more on that in a moment, because it has earned a day of its own.
It arrives somewhere around the second morning. On the first day the quiet is the whole holiday — the gardens, the long dinner, the deep sleep the silence buys you. By the second it has done its work, and you catch yourself at breakfast watching the fells on the skyline and wondering what’s over there. Good. That’s exactly the state of mind this page was written for: a coat by the door, the car waiting outside, and not one further decision required of you until dinner — no map, and none of your holiday spent driving the lanes you came here to escape.
Here’s a day no other hotel in the Lakes can quite offer, because it follows your own river. The Gilpin rises in the lanes around the hotel and runs south through the damson valleys towards Morecambe Bay — and for one easy half-day, so do you. First to Cartmel: a village gathered around a priory that has stood for more than eight centuries, a proper square where time keeps village pace, and the little shop whose sticky toffee pudding has made the place a pilgrimage site all on its own. Then a few minutes on to Grange-over-Sands, the Edwardian resort the twentieth century forgot to spoil, for a slow walk along the promenade — long, flat and railing-sided, with ornamental gardens at your back and the vast silver spread of Morecambe Bay opening in front of you, wading birds working the shine where the tide has been. It is the kind of walking that empties your head rather than your legs.
Home over Cartmel Fell, with Windermere suddenly laid out below you, and you’re back for the spa by mid-afternoon. We run it as a bespoke half-day from the hotel, from £459 for the group — or it stretches beautifully into a full day with Holker Hall, a short hop from Cartmel, folded in.
The Lake District’s neighbour is a different country altogether. Where the Lakes are dark volcanic drama, the Dales are limestone — pale, terraced, glowing like bone in low sun — and from Gilpin the border is startlingly close: slip east past Kendal and within half an hour the walls change colour and the valleys widen. Cobbled Dent. The great arches of the Ribblehead Viaduct striding across empty moor. Waterfalls, sheep-cropped pastures, and the strange bare limestone pavements laid down in a tropical sea long before there were feet to walk them. As a scheduled day, our All Creatures Great and Small tour goes deep into the Dales from Windermere station, ten minutes from the hotel; or we’ll build you a bespoke Dales day collected at the hotel, shaped entirely around what you want from it — full bespoke days from £915 for the group.
Staying longer? Give us a week and no two days will look alike — the classic lakes and passes, the literary valleys, the coast. Tell us what you’re into and we’ll build the week around it.
From Crook, everything worth seeing involves a drive — so it is worth letting somebody else do it. Our tours carry seven guests at most and leave from Windermere station, ten minutes away; private tours collect at the hotel.
Worth knowing before you choose: any of these tours can also run privately, collected from the hotel — the same tour, for your party alone. Just say so when you enquire.
Our small-group tours carry seven guests at most. Any of them can also run privately, collected from the hotel, for your party alone.
This is arguably the best season to have booked the quiet over the lake view. Step outside on an October morning and the air itself has changed — that first cold, mineral bite that smells faintly of woodsmoke and wet earth, the kind that makes you want to walk before breakfast rather than after it. The woodland and farmland around the grounds turn properly: beech and oak along the lanes going gold and copper, hedgerows heavy with hips and haws, and the low sun catching every leaf still holding on so the whole walk seems lit from within. With the A591 traffic thinned right down, the advantage of sitting off the main road is doubled — you get all that colour without a single coach party chasing it, just birdsong, the crunch of leaves underfoot, and your own breath in the air.
Kendal's market keeps its full autumn rhythm, stallholders wrapped up against the chill, the smell of hot food drifting between the stalls. If your stay falls in September, Levens Hall's extraordinary topiary is worth timing a visit around — it looks its most theatrical against low light and turning trees, and the garden closes for the season in early October, so it's genuinely a last-chance outing rather than a standing recommendation. For anything later in the autumn, Sizergh's limestone garden and woodland stay open and colour just as beautifully, without the deadline. And back at the Lake House, the tarn holds every colour of the woods around it in near-perfect reflection, stiller now the season's crowds have gone — the kind of view that makes you stop mid-sentence, and the reason to book this exact window rather than any other.
For what's open, what's turning and the tours that suit the season, see our guide to the Lake District in autumn.
For a stay of this kind — quiet, food-led, unhurried — a private tour is the natural companion. We collect you from the hotel, so there is no meeting point to drive to. Well-behaved dogs travel safely in the crates our vehicles carry.
The country round Gilpin is lane country. Crook, the Lyth Valley and the Winster lanes are narrow, high-hedged and single-track for long stretches, and the way across to the Sawrey shore is the same. Our private tours are made for exactly this — roads that belong to the country rather than to motorways and cities, wet lanes included, over a full day in comfort. Your guide drives.
Not sure which route suits your plans, or want a day built entirely from scratch — a family reunion, a wedding anniversary, scattering ashes somewhere that mattered? Tell us what you have in mind and we'll design a day around it — see our guide to celebrating a special occasion for ideas, or get in touch directly.
Car-free: harder here than in the towns — bus service through Crook is limited. Most guests drive in and then leave the car for tour days, or arrive by train to Windermere and taxi across.
Evenings: the hotel is a destination for dinner in its own right, which suits the location; if you want to eat elsewhere, plan a taxi.
Timing: book tour days when you book the room — seven seats, and summer dates go two to three weeks out.
Ages: our tours suit adults and older children, about seven and up.
In the quiet lanes at Crook, a few miles east of Windermere — far enough off the main road that most passing traffic never sees it.
Windermere station, about ten to twelve minutes by car — Bowness Pier 1 and Ambleside library are our other two. On private tours we can usually collect you at the hotel.
A separate house on its own grounds a short drive from the main hotel, run as a small private retreat with its own tarn. Guests there have use of the main hotel's facilities.
Yes, two ways. Our All Creatures Great and Small scheduled tour goes deep into the Dales from Windermere station, ten minutes away, and the Brontë Country day heads further east still. Or we can build a bespoke Dales day collected at the hotel — limestone country, cobbled Dent and the Ribblehead Viaduct, shaped entirely around you.
Very much — it's about half an hour south: a priory more than eight centuries old, a proper village square, and the shop whose sticky toffee pudding made it famous. We pair it with a walk along the Edwardian promenade at Grange-over-Sands as a relaxed bespoke half-day from the hotel.
Into the surrounding lanes and farmland, yes — but this is quiet countryside rather than fell country. For the lake, the villages and the mountains you will want a car or a tour day.
Any of our tours, run privately: your own guide and minibus, collected from the hotel, on the date that suits you, with nobody in the minibus you didn't bring.
With six or seven of you, a private tour costs less per person than the scheduled tour.
Book a private tourTailor-made for each individual booking — the places and the people you most want to see.
Plan a bespoke tourLake District Tours is an independent local tour company based in Kendal. This guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by Gilpin Hotel & Lake House.
This page was checked by Phil in .
