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Buttermere is small — less than two miles long — and the fells around it are not the highest in the Lake District. But the relationship between the lake and the fells is proportioned in a way that the larger lakes cannot quite match. At Windermere or Ullswater, the scale is almost too large for the eye to hold. At Buttermere, everything is just within reach. The fells come right down to the water's edge. The lake fills the valley floor completely. The reflections are perfect.
On a calm day with good light, Buttermere is the most photographed lake in the National Park — not because it is the most famous, but because the conditions for reflection photography come together more reliably here than almost anywhere else in the Lakes.
Buttermere valley is one of the most remote of the accessible valleys in the Lake District. It lies west of the main tourist spine of the A591, beyond the Honister Pass, and is reached either by climbing over Honister (from Borrowdale) or Newlands Hause (from Keswick). This relative isolation keeps visitor numbers lower than the southern Lakes — the car park at Buttermere village fills more slowly than Tarn Hows or Grasmere, and the circular walk around the lake, even in summer, offers reasonable solitude.
The village of Buttermere itself is tiny — a pub, a farmhouse hotel, a church and a handful of other buildings. It has been here since at least the medieval period and has not grown significantly since. The lack of development is partly the result of National Trust land ownership of the surrounding farmland.
The walk around Buttermere lake is 4.5 miles and takes approximately two hours at a comfortable pace. The terrain is good underfoot for most of the year, with some rougher sections on the southern shore. The walk passes through a tunnel blasted through the rock at the foot of High Stile — a short, dark passage with the lake visible at the far end.
From the northern end of the lake, the view south along the water towards High Crag and High Stile (the highest peaks in the immediate area at around 800 metres) is one of the classic Lake District compositions. Straight ahead: water. On both sides: fell. Behind: the valley running back north to Crummock Water.
Buttermere and Crummock Water were a single lake before the Holocene period — the connecting flat ground between them is the debris of a lateral moraine, deposited as the glacier retreated. Crummock Water lies immediately to the north and is twice the size of Buttermere. The two lakes together form one of the most complete valley landscapes in the western Lakes.
Crummock Water is less visited than Buttermere — it has no circular path of the same quality — but the view of it from the northern end of Buttermere, looking back across the flat ground where the two lakes almost meet, is part of the Buttermere experience.
In 1802, a young woman named Mary Robinson, who worked at the Fish Inn in Buttermere village and was known locally as the Maid of Buttermere for her extraordinary beauty, was deceived into marriage by a man calling himself Colonel Hope who was in fact an impostor, forger and bigamist named John Hatfield. The case became a national sensation — Coleridge reported on it for a London newspaper; Wordsworth wrote about it in The Prelude. Hatfield was hanged at Carlisle in 1803.
Mary Robinson recovered, remarried a local farmer and lived in the valley for the rest of her life. The Fish Inn is still open.
Buttermere is included in the western Lakes section of our 8 Lakes Morning Tour and 8 Lakes Afternoon Tour. Your expert storyteller will tell you the full story of the Maid of Buttermere.