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There has been a passenger boat on Windermere since 1845, and the oldest one still working was launched in 1891. That is the first thing to know about a Windermere cruise: you are not taking a tourist ride, you are joining a service that has been running, in one form or another, for one hundred and eighty years — and on the best days of the year you can do it aboard a boat that carried Queen Victoria's subjects.
The second thing to know is that ten and a half miles of water is the only place from which you can see this lake at all.
Windermere is the largest natural lake in England, ten and a half miles from Waterhead in the north to Lakeside in the south, and for most of its history the boat was simply the quickest way along it. The first steamer, Lady of the Lake, went into service in 1845, two years before the railway reached Windermere, and by 1858 the two rival companies running boats had merged into the Windermere United Yacht Company. Then in 1869 the Furness Railway built a branch line up from Ulverston to a station at Lakeside, where the platform ran straight out onto the pier, so that a passenger from Lancashire could step off a train and onto a steamer without getting wet. Within three years the railway owned the boats as well, and Windermere's cruises have been a railway inheritance ever since.
They still are, in a way. The Lakeside and Haverthwaite Railway now runs steam trains on the last three and a half miles of that Furness branch, and the boats still meet them at the Lakeside pier, so that a day on the water can begin and end with a steam engine.
Three of the fleet are old enough to have names in the history books, and the oldest is Tern. She was ordered by the Furness Railway in 1890 from a yard at Wivenhoe in Essex, built there, taken apart, carried north in sections by train and riveted back together at Lakeside, and launched on 27 June 1891 as the largest vessel on the lake, with room for more than six hundred passengers in first and third class. She was going to be called Swallow; somebody changed their mind at the last minute. Her canoe-shaped bow and long, low, elegant lines were designed for a Victorian lake and still look right on it, which is why she is the boat on the postcards.
Her career has been long and eventful. She was a steam yacht for the first sixty-odd years; she was requisitioned in the Second World War as a training ship for sea cadets and renamed HMS Undine; she has since been converted to diesel and refitted more than once. In 1973, during the filming of Swallows and Amazons, the children's dinghy came within a few feet of her bows and the near-miss was written into the film. By her own operator's reckoning she has covered more than a million miles on this one lake and carried some seventeen million passengers. She is a member of the National Historic Fleet, the maritime equivalent of a Grade I listing.
Her two sisters are younger and bigger. Teal was launched at Lakeside on 4 July 1936 and Swan on 24 June 1938, both built by Vickers at Barrow — the shipyard that builds Britain's submarines — and both carried up the lake in pieces by rail in the same way as Tern. They are broad, comfortable boats with open upper decks and saloons below, each able to take more than five hundred people, and they were the London, Midland and Scottish Railway's last investment in its Windermere fleet before the war. All three are commonly called steamers, and none of them has been a steamer for decades, but nobody on the lake is going to correct you.
From the shore, Windermere is a lake you glimpse. From the water it is a lake you finally understand. Leaving Bowness northwards the boat threads between Belle Isle and the smaller islands, and the whole upper lake opens ahead: the wooded western shore of Claife, the villas and boathouses of the eastern side, and at the far end the ring of fells above Ambleside — Wansfell, Loughrigg, the Langdale Pikes standing up behind — that makes this the most painted view in the north of England. The sailing from Bowness to Ambleside takes a little over half an hour, and it is the half hour most people remember.
Southwards the lake is quieter and narrower, hemmed in by woods on both sides, and the sailing to Lakeside, three-quarters of an hour or so, passes Storrs Hall and the Ferry Nab narrows and ends among the oakwoods at the foot of the lake where the River Leven runs out towards Morecambe Bay. There are also shorter circuits of the islands. The routes are colour-coded on the timetable, the boats run year-round with a reduced winter service, and the piers are at Bowness, Waterhead for Ambleside, and Lakeside. The Windermere Ferry, which crosses the lake at Ferry Nab, is a separate thing — a chain ferry carrying cars and foot passengers over to Far Sawrey — and it is how our Beatrix Potter tours reach the western shore.
The fleet is seventeen boats strong — the three historic vessels, a fourth large boat, Swift, launched in 2020, and a dozen smaller modern launches — and which one takes any particular sailing depends on the day, the season and the numbers, so it cannot be promised. The scheduled Bowness–Ambleside service is often one of the big three in high summer. The last sailings of the afternoon, when the light goes long and gold down the lake and the wind drops, are the best of the day whichever boat you find yourself on.
Our Beatrix Potter's Hill Top and a Windermere Cruise ends on the water: after Hill Top and Hawkshead, you board a scheduled Windermere Lake Cruises sailing at Ambleside pier and come down the lake to Bowness Pier 1 with the fells behind you and the ticket included, landing at Bowness at the end of the day. From £99 per person, seven guests at most. The Beatrix Potter Morning Tour covers the same countryside without the cruise. On the 10 Lakes Full-day Tour the day's cruise is normally on Ullswater instead.
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.