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Tarn Hows is not a natural lake. The tarn — a shallow upland pool surrounded by mixed woodland and rough pasture, three miles north of Hawkshead — was created in the 19th century when a series of smaller pools were joined by raising the water level. The result is a body of water with a deliberately scenic quality: the irregular shoreline, the wooded backdrop, the open fells visible above the tree line. It was designed to look natural and it looks very natural indeed.
In June, with the deciduous woodland newly in full leaf and the late spring wildflowers still in the grass around the tarn, it is at its most quietly beautiful.
The path around Tarn Hows is approximately two miles — a flat, well-maintained circuit that takes between 45 minutes and an hour at a comfortable pace. It is the most accessible fell-edge walk in the southern Lakes: the surface is good enough for pushchairs on most sections, the total elevation change is minimal, and the views from every point on the circuit are excellent.
The full circuit passes through mixed woodland of larch, oak, Scots pine and birch — planted in the 19th century as part of the designed landscape but now mature enough to feel genuinely established. In June the larch, which is deciduous, has its fresh early-summer foliage — a particular yellow-green that is specific to early summer and specific to larch, different in character from the heavier green of the surrounding oak.
Tarn Hows is one of the most reliable places in the Lake District to see red squirrels. The mixed woodland around the tarn supports a resident population, and the early morning circuit — before 9am, before the car park fills — consistently produces sightings. The squirrels are most active in the hours after dawn and in the late afternoon; the middle of the day is less productive.
The red squirrel at Tarn Hows is a genuine wildlife encounter rather than a managed feeding station experience. The squirrels move through the canopy and among the tree roots in normal foraging behaviour, and while they are habituated to human presence they are not tame. A sighting requires patience and quiet movement.
Tarn Hows was bought by Beatrix Potter in 1930 — one of the later additions to the land she was accumulating for eventual transfer to the National Trust. She gifted it to the Trust, with specific conditions about its management, in 1930. The Trust has managed it as public open space since then.
Potter valued Tarn Hows not primarily for its scenic qualities but for its habitat value: the mixed woodland, the open water, the rough pasture around the margins. Her understanding of what the landscape needed to sustain its wildlife was ahead of most conservation thinking of the 1930s.
The National Trust car park at Tarn Hows fills quickly on summer weekends — by 9.30am on a clear Saturday in July it is typically full, with cars parking on the roadside. Arriving before 9am guarantees a space and gives the best chance of quiet on the circuit.
From Hawkshead, the walk to Tarn Hows via the Hawkshead Hill path takes approximately 45 minutes and entirely avoids the car park problem. This approach — through the hill pasture and old woodland above Hawkshead — is one of the finer approaches to any Lake District destination and is almost never used by visitors arriving by car.
On our Beatrix Potter Hidden Country morning tour, Tarn Hows is visited in the context of Potter's conservation legacy — the tarn as one of the places she specifically chose to protect and what it tells us about what she understood.
Tarn Hows is on the Beatrix Potter Hidden Country morning tour.