Buttermere: The Valley That Perfected the Lake District

If the Lake District ever needed to submit a single valley as evidence of what it does best, it would send Buttermere. Here, in the quiet north-western corner of the district, two lakes – Buttermere itself and its larger twin Crummock Water – lie beneath an amphitheatre of shapely fells in a composition so complete that visitors have been making the pilgrimage since the very dawn of Lakeland tourism in the eighteenth century. This is also sacred ground for walkers: Haystacks, the craggy little mountain at the valley head, was the favourite of Alfred Wainwright, the most beloved of all fell-walking writers, and holds his ashes. Our full-day scenic routes cross the high passes to reach Buttermere precisely because no ten-lake day would be honest without it. Here is the local guide to the perfect valley.

Two lakes that used to be one

The valley's geography is a neat glacial story: Buttermere (the "lake by the dairy pastures" – this was prized grazing land long before it was scenery) and Crummock Water originally formed a single post-glacial lake, gradually divided by the flat apron of debris washed down from the surrounding fells – on which the tiny village of Buttermere now sits between its two waters. Buttermere is the more intimate: a mile and a half long, cupped tightly by Fleetwith Pike, Haystacks and the High Stile ridge, its far shore famously fringed with pines that furnish one of the most photographed lake scenes in Britain. Crummock Water, longer and more open, runs north toward Loweswater in bigger, airier scenery, with Mellbreak rising sheer from its western shore. Together with the surrounding commons and farms they are largely in the care of the National Trust, which is why the valley remains so miraculously unspoilt: no development to speak of, no jet-skis, just water, fell, sheep and light.

The lap of honour: walking round Buttermere

Buttermere offers what few lakes anywhere can: a complete, mostly level shoreline circuit of about four and a half miles that ordinary visitors in ordinary footwear can actually enjoy – widely and rightly called one of the best low-level walks in the country. The path hugs the water the whole way round, passing the pines, a beach or two, waterfalls tumbling off the High Stile side, and one charming surprise: a short rock tunnel cut through a lakeside crag, reputedly to give a nineteenth-century landowner an uninterrupted stroll. Allow two to two and a half unhurried hours; the fells rearrange themselves around you continuously, and there is no bad direction, though we favour clockwise for the way Fleetwith Pike stages its finale. Those with less time get rich rewards from just the first half-mile beyond the village – which is exactly the taste our touring stops provide.

Wainwright and Haystacks

The blunt little peak closing the valley's head carries the district's most touching literary shrine. Alfred Wainwright – the Blackburn borough treasurer whose hand-drawn, hand-written Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells (1955–66) remain the walker's bible and one of the great eccentric masterpieces of English publishing – loved Haystacks above all the 214 fells he chronicled, praising its crags, tarns and hidden corners as a mountain in miniature; and after his death in 1991 his ashes were scattered, at his wish, by Innominate Tarn on its summit plateau. In the little valley church of St James, Buttermere, a memorial tablet to Wainwright sits in a south window – placed so that anyone reading it looks up, through the glass, directly at Haystacks. It is the best-sited memorial we know, and pointing that window out to guests never loses its quiet power. Wainwright's advice to those who follow him onto the fells serves every Lakeland visitor: watch where you are putting your feet – and look around.

The valley's tall tales and cold facts

Buttermere's human stories run deeper than its size suggests. The village inn was the home of the celebrated "Maid of Buttermere", Mary Robinson, a landlord's daughter whose beauty was hymned by 1790s tourists and who was infamously deceived into marriage by a bigamist impostor posing as a nobleman – a national scandal that drew in the Lake Poets themselves and ended with the fraudster hanged; Wordsworth, Coleridge and later writers all told her story, and the valley has never quite stopped. On the natural side: the walls of fells around the twin lakes include some of the district's most dramatic single views – the road along Crummock's shore beneath Mellbreak, Rannerdale's little side valley famous for its extraordinary spring bluebell fields (a local legend ties them to an ancient battle against the Normans), and over the shoulder, the descent from Newlands Hause past the long white leap of Moss Force waterfall, one of the great free spectacles of the north-west and a set-piece stop on our routes after rain.

Getting there: the beautiful difficulty

Buttermere's unspoilt character is guarded by its roads: every approach is a mountain pass – Honister from Borrowdale, Newlands Hause from Keswick, or the long lakeside lanes from Loweswater – all narrow, steep and spectacular, which filters the crowds and rewards the determined. It is, frankly, the drive where visiting motorists most often wish someone else were at the wheel, and where our guests most appreciate that someone is: the passes are our guides' daily bread, leaving everyone else free to gawp. The valley has the basics done well – two historic inns, a farm café famous for its ice cream, the little church – and absolutely nothing else, which is the entire point.

Perfection, scheduled daily

On our small-group scenic tours from Windermere and Ambleside – maximum seven guests – Buttermere is the deep-breath moment of the full-day circuits: over Honister Pass, down to the lakeshore, time by the water with the pines and the story of the window in the church, then out past Moss Force with Crummock shining below. Two centuries of visitors have tried to improve on the first tourists' verdict – that here the lakes and mountains achieve their classic combination – and nobody has managed it. We simply drive you there and let the valley make its own case. It has never once lost.

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.