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There is a small stone bridge on a narrow lane above Derwentwater that has been photographed more often than almost anything else in the Lake District. It is on postcards, calendars, biscuit tins and the covers of walking guides, and it has been painted since the eighteenth century. Most of the people who stop to photograph it could not tell you its name, and hardly any of them know why it looks the way it does.
This is the story of Ashness Bridge.
Ashness Bridge carries the single-track road from Borrowdale up to the hamlet of Watendlath across Barrow Beck — a mountain stream that tumbles down through the woods to Derwentwater a few hundred yards below. It is a packhorse bridge of the eighteenth century, built of slate rubble in a single humped arch just wide enough for one horse, and its parapets were kept deliberately low so that the wide panniers slung either side of a laden pony could clear them. The parapets you see today were added in the nineteenth century and the bridge was widened in the twentieth to let a car across — just. It has been Grade II listed since 1967.
Nobody recorded who built it or exactly when, because nobody records the building of a useful little bridge on a minor track. For most of its life it simply carried the traffic of the fells — wool coming down, slate and stores going up — between Keswick and the hidden valley of Watendlath above. It became famous by accident.
The answer is composition, and it is entirely unplanned. Stand on the stones of the beck a few yards upstream and look north. The bridge fills the lower third of the picture, low and rough and grey-green with lichen, with the water running white beneath it. Behind it, through a gap in the trees, Derwentwater stretches across the middle distance. And above the far shore rises the whole long ridge of Skiddaw, 931 metres, rounded and ancient and laid horizontally across the sky.
Three layers, three distances, three textures — stone, water, mountain — each one framing the next. Painters call it a natural frame, and this is one of the best in England. That nobody arranged it makes it more remarkable, not less. The eighteenth-century tourists who came to the Lakes with the Reverend William Gilpin's rules for the picturesque in their pockets — foreground interest, middle distance, a distant skyline — found that Ashness Bridge ticked every box without trying, and it has been drawing the same crowd, with better cameras, ever since.
The photograph above was taken in the 1890s. What is striking is how completely nothing has changed. The bridge is the same bridge. The beck runs the same way over the same stones. The lake and the mountain are exactly where they were. A century and more of mass tourism has passed over this spot, and it has simply absorbed it.
Barrow Beck rises on the high ground above Watendlath and comes down through the woods steeply, so that after a night's rain — which is not rare in Borrowdale, the wettest inhabited valley in England — it roars under the bridge loudly enough to be heard from the road below. Ashness Wood on either side is a mix of old oak, birch and rowan with some conifer on the higher ground, and it has been woodland of one sort or another since the ice retreated. In October the oaks turn and the lane through the wood becomes a tunnel of gold, with the cool grey-blue of Derwentwater showing through the gaps: one of the finest short stretches of autumn colour in the northern Lakes.
A little way beyond the bridge there is a small cairn to Bob Graham, the Keswick guesthouse keeper who in June 1932 ran over forty-two Lakeland fells in under twenty-four hours, a feat nobody managed to match for nearly thirty years and which is still, as the Bob Graham Round, the great test of British fell running. The cairn is modest and easily missed, which he would probably have liked.
Half a mile further up the lane, where the road comes out of the trees at the top of a crag, is Surprise View, and the two are nearly always visited together. They complement each other exactly. Ashness Bridge is the intimate composition, the picture within a frame. Surprise View is the wide shot — the whole of Derwentwater spread out beneath you, Keswick at the far end, Bassenthwaite Lake beyond it and the Skiddaw range across everything. One is picturesque and the other is sublime, to use the two words the Romantics used, and it is worth having both within ten minutes of each other.
The lane continues over the top and drops into Watendlath, a hanging valley with a tarn, a farm and a packhorse bridge of its own that Hugh Walpole made the home of Judith Paris in his Herries novels of the 1930s. Walpole wrote them at Brackenburn, his house on the far side of Derwentwater, looking straight across at this fellside. Keats came this way in June 1818 to see the Lodore falls just below, and Turner sketched Derwentwater from its shores. The valley has had a long time to get used to admiration.
Ashness Bridge is one of the stops on our 8 Lakes Morning Tour and 8 Lakes Afternoon Tour, and on The 10 Lakes Full-day Tour. From £79 per person for a half-day, seven guests at most, with an experienced local guide who knows exactly where to stand.
We are an independent local tour operator. This article is provided for general visitor interest and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the organisations listed. Access arrangements, opening times and site conditions can change — please check current advice before visiting.