The Lake District covers 912 square miles and holds sixteen named lakes, and no visit sees all of them. So which ones deserve your time? After years of driving guests around every one of them, here is the honest comparison — what each of the famous lakes actually offers, which reputations are deserved, and the one technicality your guide will enjoy telling you about.
Only one of them is a lake. Bassenthwaite Lake, up in the north beyond Keswick, is the only stretch of water in the district that is technically, legally and geographically a lake. Everything else is a water, a mere, a tarn or a reservoir — Windermere, Buttermere and Grasmere all carry the old word for lake inside their names, which is why "Lake Windermere" makes local pedants wince. The Lake District, strictly speaking, has one lake. It is a lovely thing to know before someone tells you.
England's largest lake at ten and a half miles long, and the one nearly every visitor meets first, because the railway has delivered people to its shore since 1847. Windermere's reputation suffers slightly from its own success — the busy piers at Bowness are not the Lake District at its wildest — but seen at length, from the quieter stretches, it earns its scale. It is the lake you organise a visit around rather than the one you fall in love with. Almost every tour we run begins beside it.
Ask guides which lake they would keep if they could keep only one, and Ullswater wins more votes than anything else. Seven and a half miles of water curving between proper mountains, with Place Fell rising straight from the eastern shore and the Helvellyn range behind. It is also the lake with the best claim on English literature: Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy walked its north-western shore in April 1802 and saw the daffodils that became the most famous poem in the language. The best way to understand Ullswater is from the water itself — our The 10 Lakes Full-day Tour includes a full hour's cruise on it, ticket included.
Derwentwater is called the Queen of the Lakes, and the title is about composition rather than size: islands scattered across the water, Catbells rising on the west shore, Keswick sitting at the northern end, and the fells of Borrowdale closing the view to the south. It is the most photogenic lake in the district from the greatest number of angles — Ashness Bridge and Surprise View, both stops on our scenic tours, are essentially viewing platforms built by history for looking at it.
These two sit in a valley that half-day itineraries cannot reach, over the top of the Honister Pass, and that is precisely their charm — they feel earned. Buttermere is small, perfectly framed, and surrounded by some of the steepest fell walls in the district; Crummock Water, its larger neighbour, gets a fraction of the attention and repays every minute given to it. If you have only a half day, you will not see them, and that is the strongest single argument for the full-day tour.
Small, gentle, and soaked in Wordsworth. Grasmere holds the poet's island and the village where the Gingerbread Shop has baked its secret recipe since 1854; Rydal Water was his daily walk. Neither will astonish you the way Ullswater does — their register is intimacy rather than drama — but they are the lakes people mean when they talk about the Lake District being lovely. Both feature on all of our scenic tours, and on the Wordsworth tours if the poetry is the point for you.
Thirlmere is a Victorian reservoir with two drowned villages beneath it and a genuinely dramatic story your guide will tell you as you pass along its shore. Brothers Water is a small, still lake at the foot of the Kirkstone Pass that most visitors drive past without knowing its name — which is exactly why we stop. Neither would headline a visit; both make the eight-lakes and ten-lakes days feel complete.
There are sixteen named lakes in the Lake District's 912 square miles, though technically only one — Bassenthwaite Lake — is officially a lake. The others are waters, meres, tarns and reservoirs.
Windermere, at ten and a half miles long, is England's largest lake. Ullswater is the second largest at around seven and a half miles.
It is genuinely contested, but Ullswater wins the most votes from guides — a long, curving lake set between proper mountains. Derwentwater is the most photogenic from the greatest number of viewpoints, and Buttermere is the favourite of many who make it over the Honister Pass.
You can see ten of them in one day on a guided full-day tour — including Windermere, Ullswater, Derwentwater, Buttermere, Crummock Water, Grasmere and Rydal Water — with a one-hour cruise on Ullswater included. Seeing that many independently in a day is practically impossible once parking and navigation are factored in.
Ullswater. William and Dorothy Wordsworth walked the lake's north-western shore in April 1802 and saw the daffodils that inspired I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.
Naming convention. Every other body of water in the district uses an older word — mere, water or tarn — that already means lake. Bassenthwaite Lake is the only one formally named a lake, which means the Lake District technically contains just one.
More on seeing the lakes properly: