Bowness-on-Windermere is the busiest place in the Lake District, and it makes no apology for it. Ice cream, swans, rowing boats for hire, the cruise boats coming and going from the piers, day-trippers on the promenade and a queue for The World of Beatrix Potter: this is where the Lake District has come to be looked at since the railway arrived in 1847, and on a summer Saturday it can feel as if everyone has arrived at once.
Stay a little longer than the day-trippers do, though, and something older shows through. Behind the church there is a village that was here five hundred years before the first tourist.
Bowness began as a Norse fishing settlement on a sheltered bay of England's largest natural lake, and for most of its history it was a small place that lived off the water: fish, timber, slate and the ferry that has crossed the narrows to the western shore for at least five hundred years. Its church, St Martin's, has been on the same site since 1203 and was rebuilt in 1483 after a fire, and it is still the oldest and most interesting building in town — walls painted with verses, some medieval glass in the east window, and in the churchyard the grave of Rasselas Belfield, who was born in Abyssinia, taken as a slave, and died a free man and a servant in Bowness in 1822, with an epitaph that says exactly that.
The knot of narrow streets behind the church, called Lowside, is the old village, and it is easily missed by anyone who stays on the lake road. The Hole in t' Wall, a pub of 1612 tucked into one of its corners, is the oldest in Bowness; Dickens drank there. Walk two minutes from the ice cream and you are in a Westmorland village of whitewashed cottages and slate roofs that has nothing to do with the crowds at the pier, and everything to do with why people came here in the first place.
What changed Bowness was the railway, and the railway never actually got here. When the Kendal and Windermere line was built in 1847 the people of Bowness objected to a station in their village, so the line stopped a mile and a half up the hill at a hamlet called Birthwaite, which the railway company promptly renamed Windermere after the lake. That is why there are two places: Windermere, the town that grew round the station, and Bowness, the village on the shore below it. Wordsworth, in his seventies and living at Rydal, wrote furious letters to the newspapers against the line. It came anyway, and with it came everybody else.
The people who arrived first were rich. Along the shore north of the bay the Victorian industrialists of Lancashire built their villas, and most of those villas are now the hotels. The grandest, the Belsfield, on the rise above the pier, was bought in 1869 by Henry Schneider, the Barrow ironmaster, who commuted to his works every morning by steam yacht: his servants carried breakfast aboard the Esperance at the Belsfield's private jetty, he ate it on the way down the lake to Lakeside, and there his own private railway carriage was waiting to take him on to Barrow. The Esperance survives, and you can see her at the Windermere Jetty Museum a short way along the shore — she is also, by general agreement, the model for Captain Flint's houseboat in Swallows and Amazons, which Arthur Ransome set on a lake that is Windermere and Coniston combined. In his books Bowness is Rio, and the crowds are the reason the children give for never going ashore there.
Sit at the end of the pier and look straight out and the view is closed by a long wooded island. This is Belle Isle, the largest of the eighteen islands in the lake, and for centuries the manor of Windermere was administered from it. In 1774 a Nottingham gentleman called Thomas English built a house on it that was, as far as anyone knows, the first completely circular house in England: a plain drum with a dome and a portico, designed by John Plaw, which the locals thought absurd and which is now Grade I listed. English ran out of money and in 1781 the island was bought by the Curwens of Workington, who renamed it Belle Isle after Isabella Curwen, the heiress who had brought the money. The house is still there, still private, and still round; you see its dome from the boats, and from nowhere else.
Before it hired boats out, Bowness built them. For a hundred and fifty years the boatyards along the bay turned out the sailing yachts, rowing boats and steam launches of the wealthy lake, and the best of what survives is a few minutes along the shore at the Windermere Jetty Museum, which reopened in 2019 after a twelve-year rebuild in a set of long, dark, beautifully judged boathouses on the water's edge. The collection includes Dolly, a steam launch of about 1850 that sank in Ullswater in the great frost of 1895 and lay on the bottom for sixty-seven years before she was raised and found to be in working order, the Raven, the Furness Railway's cargo steamer of 1871, and Schneider's Esperance. On a fine day the museum takes visitors out on the lake in a steam launch, which is the right way to see boats.
And the boats are still the point of Bowness. From the piers below the village, Windermere Lake Cruises runs the length of the lake — north to Ambleside, south to Lakeside — aboard a fleet that includes Tern of 1891 and her 1930s sisters, and there is a whole article about those boats and what you see from them here. The chain ferry, a mile south at Ferry Nab, still crosses to the western shore every twenty minutes or so, as something has done for five centuries, and it is the way to Near Sawrey, Hill Top and Hawkshead.
Bowness Pier 1 is one of the pickup points for our Beatrix Potter Morning Tour and for Beatrix Potter's Hill Top and a Windermere Cruise — and the afternoon tour ends here, with the last leg of the day spent on the water, arriving back at the pier by boat with the ticket included. From £79 per person, seven guests at most.
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.
