Derwentwater is not the largest lake in the Lake District — that is Windermere, eleven miles to the south. It is not the deepest — that is Wastwater. It is not the most dramatic in setting — that argument belongs to Ullswater. But Derwentwater is, by general consensus, the most beautiful, and has been considered so since the first tourists began arriving in the 1760s with their Claude glasses and their copies of Thomas West's Guide to the Lakes.
The title the Victorians gave it — the Queen of the English Lakes — was not uncontested but it has endured, and standing on the promontory at Friar's Crag on a still October morning with the lake flat and dark below and the Borrowdale fells closing the southern end, it is difficult to dispute.
Derwentwater lies immediately south of Keswick, connected to the town by the River Greta. It is approximately three miles long and just over a mile wide — compact enough that the whole lake is visible from any elevated point on its shore, large enough that the far shore feels genuinely remote. The surrounding fells — Catbells to the west, Walla Crag and Falcon Crag to the east, Castle Crag and the Borrowdale fells to the south — create a complete enclosure. In calm conditions the lake is a mirror. In wind it breaks into whitecaps. In winter frost it acquires a stillness that produces silence in almost everyone who sees it for the first time.
The underlying rock is Borrowdale Volcanic — the dark, ancient igneous rock of the central Lake District, which weathers to the grey-green characteristic of the fells above the lake. The lakeside woodland — ancient oak and ash, with an understorey of hazel and holly — grows directly from the volcanic ground and gives the shore its particular character: not the managed parkland of Windermere but something that feels older and wilder and less arranged.
Derwentwater has four main islands: Lord's Island, St Herbert's Island, Rampsholme and Derwent Island. Each has its own history.
St Herbert's Island is the most significant. St Herbert was a 7th-century hermit, a disciple of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who retreated to the island to live in solitude. He is said to have prayed to die on the same day as his friend Cuthbert, and tradition holds that the prayer was granted — both dying on 20 March 687. The island has been a place of pilgrimage since the medieval period; a fair was held there on his feast day until the Reformation suppressed it.
Derwent Island is occupied by a mid-18th-century house — Derwent Island House — and is owned by the National Trust. It is open to the public on five days per year; the rest of the time it sits in the middle of the lake as a private world, visible from every shore, accessible to almost no one.
Lord's Island was the site of the Earl of Derwentwater's summer residence, of which nothing now remains above ground. James Radcliffe, the third and last Earl, was executed on Tower Hill in 1716 following the Jacobite rising of 1715, and his estates — including Lord's Island — were forfeited to the Crown.
The promontory of Friar's Crag, a ten-minute walk south of Keswick boat landings, gives the most celebrated view of Derwentwater: the wooded islands, the long reach of the lake southward, the Borrowdale fells framing the far end. John Ruskin, who lived at Brantwood on Coniston Water from 1872, wrote that the view from Friar's Crag was one of the three or four most beautiful scenes in Europe. He first saw it as a child, and the memory stayed with him for the rest of his life. A memorial to Ruskin — a rough-hewn block of Borrowdale stone with a bronze medallion portrait — stands at the point.
The path to Friar's Crag through the lakeside oak woodland is carpeted with bluebells in late April and early May. In October the same woodland turns gold and copper, the leaves reflected in the lake below. At any time of year the walk from the boat landings to Friar's Crag and back — twenty minutes at a comfortable pace — is one of the finest short walks in the Lake District.
The Keswick Launch operates a regular circular service around Derwentwater, calling at seven landing stages. The lake from the water is a different experience from the lake from the shore: the fells rise more steeply, the woodland comes to the water's edge, and the scale of the surrounding landscape becomes apparent in a way that it cannot from any single shore viewpoint.
The service runs year-round, reduced in winter. The full circuit takes approximately 50 minutes.
Derwentwater is inseparable from Keswick, the market town that sits at its northern end. Keswick has served as the base for Lake District tourism since the 18th century — the Moot Hall on Market Square was a tourist information point in all but name by the 1780s. The pencil museum — commemorating the Borrowdale graphite mines that supplied the world's pencil industry from the 16th century — is in Keswick. The market, held every Thursday and Saturday in the town centre, is one of the finest in Cumbria.
The 8 Lakes Morning and Afternoon Tours include Derwentwater as one of their eight lakes, with a stop at Surprise View above the eastern shore. Your expert storyteller covers the Ruskin connection, the island histories, the geology and the Victorian tourist tradition that established the lake as the centrepiece of the Lake District experience.
Derwentwater is on every 8 Lakes tour and the The 10 Lakes Full-day Tour with Ullswater Cruise.