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Windermere is eleven miles long, one mile wide at its broadest, and the largest natural lake in England. It is also the most visited, the most commercially developed and, in some quarters, the most underestimated. The assumption — widespread among visitors who know the Lake District well enough to have opinions about it — is that Windermere is the obvious choice, the tourist lake, and that the real Lake District is elsewhere.
This is partly true and partly wrong.
Windermere occupies a glacially carved valley between the Pennine fringe to the east and the Silurian slate hills to the west. It is a ribbon lake — long, narrow, formed when the glacier carved deeply along a zone of weakness in the rock. The surrounding landscape is softer and more pastoral than the volcanic central Lakes; the hills above the lake are lower and rounder than Helvellyn or the Scafells. This is not scenery in the dramatic mode. It is scenery in the beautiful mode.
The lake itself is remarkable for its scale. Standing at the shore at Bowness or Ambleside and looking south, the far end of the lake is not visible — the water curves and the southern section disappears behind the low hills above Lakeside. The sense of a body of water that is too large to be comprehended in a single view is something that smaller lakes, for all their beauty, cannot produce.
The best views of Windermere are from the water. The Windermere Lake Cruises connect Ambleside Pier in the north with Lakeside in the south, with a stop at Bowness in the middle, and the northbound journey — looking towards Ambleside with the Fairfield and Helvellyn ridges rising behind the head of the lake — is one of the finest lake views in England.
On a still morning in autumn, with mist on the water and the lower fells hidden, the northern section of the lake has a quality of total atmospheric enclosure that no photograph quite captures. The sound is as important as the view: the creak of the vessel, the water, the occasional bird. Cities become genuinely theoretical.
The western shore of Windermere, above the village of Wray, is a different experience from the Bowness waterfront. The road is narrower, the development is minimal, and the lake is visible from several excellent viewpoints as you drive north. Wray Castle — the Victorian Gothic building where Beatrix Potter first came to the Lake District in 1882 — sits on the shore here, its battlements visible above the trees.
The Claife Heights — the wooded ridge above the western shore — gives the best elevated view of the northern lake, looking from somewhere above the bustle of Bowness across the water towards Ambleside and the fells beyond. The path to the Claife Station viewpoint is a straightforward walk from the ferry landing.
The southern lake, below Bowness. The section from Bowness to Lakeside is quieter, less visited and arguably as beautiful as the northern section. The Lakeside and Haverthwaite Railway connects Lakeside to Haverthwaite by steam train; the view from Lakeside across the southern water is one of the finest of the whole lake. The Stott Park Bobbin Mill — a Victorian bobbin mill that operated until 1971 and is now an English Heritage site — is in the woods above Lakeside and gives a fascinating account of the industrial economy of the Lake District that tourist-focused Bowness does not.
Windermere is seen from Wray Castle on the Beatrix Potter Hill Top & Windermere Cruise tour and from the water on the The 10 Lakes Full-day Tour with Ullswater Cruise.