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The argument about which is the most beautiful lake in the Lake District has been running for the best part of two hundred years, and nobody has settled it, which is probably how it should be. Windermere is the largest and the most famous. Buttermere is the most perfectly proportioned. Wastwater is the most dramatic. But for scale and variety, and for the way it shows itself a reach at a time rather than all at once, Ullswater makes the strongest case of any of them.
It is a little over seven miles long, the second largest lake in the Lake District after Windermere, and it bends twice on its way from Pooley Bridge in the north to Glenridding in the south. Those bends are not a flaw in the design. They are the whole point.
Most lakes can be taken in at a glance. Stand on the shore and there it is, edge to edge, with nothing left to find. Ullswater will not do that for you. It is a ribbon lake, scooped out by a glacier and laid down in three reaches that meet at angles, with a sharp dog-leg near Howtown where the ice found a weakness in the rock. From any point on the shore you are looking at one reach while the other two stay hidden behind a headland. There is always more around the corner. That is the quality people are reaching for when they call it the most beautiful of the lakes — not a single view but a series of them, each one opening as the last one closes.
The three reaches are three different places. The southern one, around Glenridding and Patterdale, is mountain country: Place Fell rises straight out of the eastern shore in one unbroken sweep, and above the village to the west stands Helvellyn, 950 metres, the third highest mountain in England. No other lake in the district has fells this high standing this close to the water. The middle reach, past Howtown and Glencoyne, is wooded and quieter. And the northern reach, running out to Pooley Bridge, softens into farmland and low wooded hills, so that a lake which began among crags ends among fields. The rock changes beneath it as it goes, from the hard volcanic stone of the central fells to the older, gentler slates of the north, and the scenery follows the rock.
Even the name keeps its secrets. It is Norse, almost certainly, and the best guess is that the first part is a personal name — Ulf, a chieftain who held land here a thousand years ago. Nobody knows for certain, and nobody needs to. For centuries the lake was the boundary between the old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, one on each shore.
William Wordsworth knew this lake before he was famous, and it frightened him. In The Prelude he describes an evening as a schoolboy when he found a small boat tied to a willow on the shore near Patterdale, untied it and rowed out onto the lake alone. As he pulled away from the shore a great dark peak seemed to rise up from behind the ridge and stride after him across the water. He turned the boat round, rowed back trembling and put it where he had found it, and for days afterwards, he wrote, his mind was troubled by huge shapes that did not live like living men. It is one of the great set pieces of English poetry, and it happened here, on the southern reach, with the fells behind Glenridding playing the part of the monster.
The other Ullswater poem is gentler and much better known. On 15 April 1802, a wet and windy spring day, William and his sister Dorothy walked along the western shore below Gowbarrow and came upon a long belt of wild daffodils growing under the trees at the water's edge. Dorothy wrote it up in her journal that evening — the flowers tossing and reeling in the wind off the lake, some resting their heads on the stones as if they were tired, the rest laughing in the breeze. Two years later William turned her prose into the poem that begins I wandered lonely as a cloud. The daffodils still come up along that shore each spring, and the stretch of shoreline is now looked after by the National Trust. There is a separate article about exactly what the Wordsworths saw and where to see it today.
A little way up the hillside behind the daffodil shore, Aira Beck — a mountain stream — drops sixty-five feet through a wooded ravine at Aira Force, the most visited waterfall in the Lake District and, in a wet spell, one of the loudest. Above it on the fell stands Lyulph's Tower, a castellated hunting lodge built for the Duke of Norfolk in the 1780s, when Ullswater was becoming the sort of place a duke wanted a lodge with a view.
Ullswater has had a boat service since before the railways reached most of Cumbria. The Ullswater Steam Navigation Company was founded in 1855, and its first purpose was work, not pleasure: carrying lead ore, mail and miners between the Greenside mine above Glenridding — for a century the biggest lead mine in the Lake District — and the village of Pooley Bridge at the far end. The first boat, a paddle steamer called Enterprise, was launched in 1859 and spent much of her short career with her paddles choked by weed.
Then came Lady of the Lake. She was launched on 26 June 1877, built in Glasgow, carried in three sections by rail to Penrith and hauled by horse-drawn dray to the lakeside, where she was riveted back together. She has sunk twice — once at her moorings in 1881, once in a gale in 1958 — and in 1965 she was badly damaged by fire and lay out of service for fourteen years before being rebuilt and relaunched. She is still sailing, and is believed to be the oldest working passenger vessel in the country. Her sister Raven followed in 1889, commissioned after Thomas Cook, the tour operator and a shareholder in the company, complained that when Lady broke down in high season there was nothing to carry his tourists. In 1912 Raven had her decks painted yellow to serve as a temporary royal yacht for the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II, guest of the Earl of Lonsdale — the Yellow Earl — at Lowther Castle. Both boats are on the National Historic Ships register, and both are working boats to this day, running the length of the lake between Glenridding, Howtown and Pooley Bridge.
Going by water is the only way to see all three reaches in one go, and the view of the southern fells from the deck is unlike anything you can get from the road. On our 10 Lakes Full-day Tour the day's lake cruise is normally on Ullswater, aboard one of the Steamers, with the ticket included in the price and booked in advance so there is no queuing at the pier. There is more about the cruise and how it fits the day here. In winter, when the tour's cruise season is over, the 10 Lakes Winter Tour calls at Aira Force instead.
On 23 July 1955 Donald Campbell drove his jet hydroplane Bluebird K7 across Ullswater at 202.32 miles per hour and set a new world water speed record. It was the first of seven he would set in the boat, and the only one on this lake; he moved his attempts to Coniston Water, where he died in 1967 trying for an eighth. Ullswater now has a ten-mile-an-hour limit, which feels about right.
Seven years after Campbell, the lake faced a quieter threat. In 1962 Manchester Corporation brought a bill to Parliament to draw water from Ullswater and turn the lake, in effect, into a reservoir, as it had already done to Thirlmere and Haweswater. The bill was opposed in the House of Lords by Norman Birkett, Lord Birkett, a Cumbrian by birth and one of the great advocates of his age, in a speech that is still remembered. The Lords threw the bill out. Birkett died two days later. There is a fell named after him on the western side of the Helvellyn range, and a memorial plaque on Kailpot Crag near Howtown that can only be read from a boat — which is exactly how it should be seen.
The lake has a temper. On the night of 5 December 2015 Storm Desmond dropped a record quantity of rain on the Ullswater fells, the streams that feed the lake came down in torrents, Glenridding flooded twice in a week, and at Pooley Bridge the three-arched stone bridge that had crossed the River Eamont since 1764 — and given the village its name — was scoured from its footings and washed away. For five years the village made do with a temporary crossing. The replacement, opened in 2020, is a single clean span of stainless steel, the first road bridge of its kind in the country, designed to let the river through in one arch so that it can never undermine a pier again. It has become a landmark in its own right, and the valley has recovered with the same quiet stubbornness with which it does everything.
Ullswater lies about thirty miles north of Windermere by road, over the Kirkstone Pass, the highest road pass in the Lake District. The descent from the summit, with Brothers Water below you and the Patterdale valley opening beyond, is one of the great moments of any day in the Lakes, and our 10 Lakes tour crosses it. By public transport the nearest railway station is Penrith, on the West Coast Main Line, with a seasonal bus running down the lake to Glenridding.
Ullswater is the high point of The 10 Lakes Full-day Tour with Ullswater Cruise — a full day from Windermere taking in ten of the finest lakes in the National Park, with your time on the water normally spent aboard one of the Steamers. From £169 per person, seven guests at most. If you would rather have the lake more or less to yourselves, a private tour can give Ullswater the whole day.
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.