Honister Pass: The Wild Road and the Mountain That Still Works for a Living

Between the green luxuriance of Borrowdale and the perfect valley of Buttermere, the Lake District throws down its wildest stretch of road: Honister Pass, a steep, stark defile of crag and scree where the fells close in, the gradients bite, and – uniquely in the district – the mountain itself is still being worked, as it has been for centuries, for the beautiful green slate that roofs and faces buildings across the world. Honister is the moment on our full-day scenic routes when guests understand that Lakeland is not merely pretty; it is elemental. Here is the story of the pass and its mine – geology, graft and one of the most dramatic twenty minutes of road travel in England.

The pass: up the wild side

Honister climbs to about 1,167 feet between Seatoller, at the head of Borrowdale, and the shore of Buttermere – short in miles, mighty in impression. The Borrowdale approach winds up alongside a tumbling beck into an ever-narrowing trench of fells; gradients touch one-in-four; and the summit ground is a bare, boulder-strewn amphitheatre beneath the crags of Fleetwith Pike and the Honister heights – a landscape with the skin off, all rock and weather, that could hardly contrast more completely with the soft valleys twenty minutes behind. Then comes the reward: the western descent toward Buttermere, with the valley's twin lakes appearing below in one of the great reveals of Lakeland travel. The pass demands respect from drivers – narrow, steep, walled and exposed, it is emphatically not the place to be studying the scenery from behind the wheel, which our guests, sitting back while our guides handle the road they drive weekly, are gratefully spared.

The green gold of Honister

What makes Honister unlike every other pass is the industry near its summit: slate has been won from these crags for centuries – by tradition since the seventeenth century at least, with older workings likely – and Honister today operates as England's last working slate mine, still extracting the celebrated Westmorland green slate whose subtle colour graces buildings from Lakeland farmhouses to prestigious addresses worldwide. The stone itself is ancient volcanic ash, compressed and cooked half a billion years ago when this quiet corner of England was ringed with eruptions – the same Borrowdale Volcanic rocks that build the district's craggiest mountains – and its extraction bred a race of quarrymen whose exploits belong in legend: men who climbed to dizzy rock faces in all weathers, and famously rode loaded sledges of slate down screes at breakneck speed, racing gravity for a piecework wage. The visitor operation at the mine tells this story vividly, with underground tours into the old workings, a shop full of the green stone in every form from roof slates to jewellery, and a café at the summit of the pass – a warm, welcome outpost in the wildest spot on the route, and a regular stop on our full-day circuits. For the adventurous, the crags above host England's pioneering via ferrata – a cabled climbing route following the old miners' ways across the rock face – while the rest of us admire it from the café with both hands round a hot drink.

Borrowdale to Buttermere: the perfect sequence

Honister's placement is a tour-designer's gift: it forms the hinge between two of the district's supreme set-pieces. On one side, Borrowdale – the lush, crag-studded valley south of Derwentwater that generations have called the most beautiful in England, its hamlets (Rosthwaite, Seatoller, Seathwaite) sitting among oakwoods and river meadows, with Seathwaite holding the cheerful national title of wettest inhabited place in England, courtesy of the fells that wring every cloud dry. On the other, Buttermere's flawless lake-and-mountain composition. Crossing between them over Honister's bare summit delivers, in a single half-hour, the district's full emotional range – luxuriance, desolation, perfection – which is exactly why our ten-lakes days are routed this way, and why this leg draws more astonished silence per mile than any other we drive. The surrounding fells and much of both valleys are cared for by the National Trust, with route and conditions information from the National Park at lakedistrict.gov.uk.

Reading the summit landscape

The bare ground at the top rewards a minute's decoding. The crags around the mine are the Borrowdale Volcanics at their most naked – the district's hardest, craggiest rocks, born in that ancient ring of eruptions – and the debris slopes below them are not natural scree alone but centuries of quarry spoil, an industrial landform now weathering back into the mountain. Look for the old tramway inclines scored down the fellside, the ruined bothies where quarrymen sheltered, and the dark adits punched into the crag faces: the whole summit is an archive in stone, and once your eye adjusts, the "wild" pass reveals itself as one of the hardest-worked places in the district – which somehow deepens, rather than diminishes, its grandeur.

Weather, seasons and the pass's moods

Honister has weather the way theatres have lighting. In summer sun the summit bowl glitters, every ledge sharp-edged; in mist it turns properly mythic, crags looming and vanishing; after rain the whole defile runs silver with waterfalls appearing from nowhere; and in winter the pass is often the district's first road to shut under snow – our winter routes carry alternatives for exactly this reason, and the flexibility to choose on the day is one of the quiet advantages of guided touring. There is no bad Honister, only different performances; guests who cross it in wild weather tend, if anything, to boast about it hardest afterwards.

The elemental interlude

Every well-built scenic day needs its change of key – the passage that makes the pretty passages land harder – and Honister is ours. On our small-group scenic tours from Windermere and Ambleside (maximum seven guests), the pass arrives mid-circuit: up from Borrowdale's green, a stop among the slate at the summit with the miners' stories told properly, then the plunge to Buttermere with the lakes flashing below. Ten lakes and four passes make the day's arithmetic, but Honister supplies its drama – the reminder, written in half-billion-year-old volcanic stone, that this landscape was forged, worked and earned long before it was admired. We find the views mean more once you know that. Our guests, mile after mile, agree.

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.