Borrowdale: The Valley England Keeps Voting Most Beautiful
South of Derwentwater, the northern Lake District funnels all its best ideas into a single valley: Borrowdale. Here oakwoods climb to bare crags, a jade-green river winds between stone hamlets, the fells stage-manage the light through a narrow rocky gateway, and the scenery achieves a lushness – almost a rainforest quality – that surprises visitors expecting austere northern hills. Writers have been calling Borrowdale the most beautiful valley in England since the eighteenth century, and the label has stuck because nobody has produced a convincing rival. It also holds two celebrated eccentric titles: home of the wettest inhabited place in England, and of a giant balanced boulder that Victorians queued to climb. Our full-day circuits thread the valley on the way to Honister Pass. Here is what you are travelling through.
The Jaws of Borrowdale
The valley's front door is its most dramatic feature. A mile or two south of Derwentwater, the fells pinch together into a wooded rocky gorge – the "Jaws of Borrowdale" – where the road and the River Derwent squeeze side by side beneath the crag of Castle Crag, and the traveller passes, in effect, through a natural gateway from the open lake country into the enclosed inner valley. Early tourists found the Jaws deliciously terrifying (eighteenth-century visitors were encouraged to fear that the crags might topple); modern ones find them simply gorgeous, especially in autumn when the oakwoods turn. The woods themselves are a treasure in their own right: Borrowdale preserves some of England's finest ancient Atlantic oak woodland – damp, mossy, fern-hung habitat of national rarity, much of it in National Trust care – and the valley's green intensity owes everything to its famous rainfall, of which more below.
The Bowder Stone and the valley's curiosities
Just beyond the Jaws sits Lakeland's oddest monument: the Bowder Stone, a house-sized boulder of some two thousand tons balanced improbably on one edge, as if set down mid-roll and forgotten – geologists debate whether it fell from the crags above or hitched here on Ice Age ice. Georgian showmen made it a sensation: a ladder has invited visitors to the top for over two centuries (the current one continues the tradition), and climbing the Stone remains a cheerful rite of passage. Borrowdale's curiosity cabinet extends further: the valley's graphite deposits – the purest ever found – sparked the world's pencil industry in nearby Keswick and were once so valuable the mines were guarded like bullion; the hamlet of Watendlath, up its hanging side-valley past Ashness Bridge, is a perfect huddle of farms by a tarn, beloved of novelist Hugh Walpole, who set his Rogue Herries chronicles hereabouts; and the valley floor hamlets – Grange with its double-arched bridge, Rosthwaite, Stonethwaite, Seatoller – are as unspoilt a set of Lakeland settlements as survives anywhere.
The wettest address in England
Borrowdale's lushness is bought with the country's most famous rainfall statistics. The hamlet of Seathwaite, at the valley's very head beneath the highest fells, holds the cherished title of wettest inhabited place in England – its farm rain gauges recording several times the national average, thanks to the wall of mountains (the Scafell massif among them) that stands directly in the path of Atlantic weather and wrings the clouds dry. Locals wear the title with pride; the valley wears its consequences in mosses, ferns, waterfalls and fifty shades of green that drier landscapes simply cannot grow. The practical visitor lesson is the Lakeland constant – carry a waterproof, treat showers as scenery – and the aesthetic lesson is that Borrowdale immediately after rain, steaming and glittering with every beck in spate, is arguably the valley at its absolute best. Seatoller, the neighbouring hamlet at the foot of Honister Pass, makes the traditional pause before the wild climb west – an oasis of trees and whitewash on the edge of the stone country.
The valley that still farms
Part of Borrowdale's beauty is that it remains emphatically a working place: the valley-floor meadows are cut for hay and grazed by the tough little Herdwick sheep – the district's native breed, born black, greying to slate like the local stone – whose hefted flocks (each knowing its own unfenced fell by inheritance) are the living machinery behind the whole look of the landscape, cropped turf, drystone walls and all. Beatrix Potter, the breed's most famous champion, owned farms hereabouts among the fourteen she left to the National Trust, and the UNESCO World Heritage inscription honours exactly this partnership of farming and scenery. The postcard, in other words, has a workforce – and they have four legs.
Walks, viewpoints and the valley on foot
For those with time to linger, Borrowdale is a walker's paradise pitched at every grade: the riverside paths between Grange and Rosthwaite amble through the Jaws at water level; Castle Crag – the little wooded fell in the valley's throat, crowned with a hill fort site and quarry caves once inhabited by a famous local hermit – gives a short, sharp climb to one of the finest small-summit views in Britain; and the connoisseurs' viewpoint above the eastern woods, Surprise View, frames Derwentwater and Skiddaw in a single theatrical reveal (our Derwentwater guide covers it fully). Ambitious feet continue to Watendlath's tarn, or up-valley toward the great passes into the mountain sanctuaries beyond; the National Park's route information at lakedistrict.gov.uk covers conditions and options. Touring guests need none of the effort: the valley road itself is the exhibition, and the stops do the rest.
The most beautiful mile of the day
On our small-group scenic tours from Windermere and Ambleside – maximum seven guests – Borrowdale arrives in the afternoon of the full-day circuits, after the Derwentwater lunch stop: through the Jaws, past the oakwoods and hamlets, up the ever-wilder valley to Seatoller and over Honister to Buttermere – a sequence we would defend as the most beautiful continuous hour of road travel in England, narrated by guides who can name every crag and tell you why the pencils, the graphite guards and the hermit of Castle Crag all belong to the same small valley. England has been holding an informal most-beautiful-valley contest for two and a half centuries. Come and inspect the reigning champion; the judges' verdict, we find, is rarely contested from the back seats.
This article is part of our scenic Lake District guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.