Watendlath: The Tarn, the Packhorse Bridge and Getting There from Keswick

Watendlath is a hamlet and a tarn, sitting high between the Borrowdale and Thirlmere valleys at 863 feet (263 m) above sea level. All of it is owned by the National Trust, and it amounts to a farm, a few buildings and a small lake. It is not a village with shops, and anyone expecting one will be disappointed.

The reason to come up from Keswick is the road as much as the destination. A single minor road leaves the Borrowdale road (B5289) and winds up over Ashness Bridge, a traditional stone packhorse bridge that Wikipedia describes as “perhaps the best-known and most photographed packhorse bridge in the whole of England”. On the way it passes Surprise View, which at 4.9 from 2,934 Google reviews is by a wide margin the most-reviewed thing anywhere near the hamlet.

The straight-line distance from Keswick is 7.1 km. Wikipedia gives no road mileage, and the driven distance will be longer, since the road climbs out of the valley rather than crossing it.

The tarn, the beck and the trout

Watendlath Tarn is fed by Bleatarn Gill, running down from Blea Tarn 700 feet (210 m) above it below Bell Crags. It is seven acres (2.8 hectares) in size, with a maximum depth of 56 feet (17 m). Its outflow becomes Watendlath Beck, which feeds Lodore Falls and finishes in Derwent Water, so the water beside you here is the water you saw from the Keswick shore.

The tarn came to the National Trust as a gift from Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s daughter, in memory of her brother King Edward VII. It is stocked with brown trout and rainbow trout and is a popular fly-fishing water, fished both by wading and from a boat.

Ratings here mean little, because the samples are tiny: Watendlath Tarn holds 4.9 from 20 Google reviews, Watendlath Bothy 4.8 from 12, and the National Trust car park 4.5 from 28.

The single-track road, the passing places and the size of your car

The road up is single track and unmarked, and Wikipedia is explicit that motorists meeting anything coming the other way must use the passing places provided. Reversing on a narrow climb is part of the deal.

Vehicle size is the constraint reviewers keep raising. Writing about the drive to Surprise View, a visitor in July 2026 warned that it “Is a fairly steep and narrow road to reach in car, definitely not suitable for anything larger than a big car.” The viewpoint itself is easily overshot: another visitor in July 2026 admitted, “We completely missed this viewpoint on the way up to Watendlath Tarn”, catching it instead on the way back down, and advised, “Mind the sheer drop but plenty of space to take it all in”.

Near Ashness Bridge stands a cairn to the fell-runner Robert Graham, who in 1932 set a Lakeland 24-hour record of 42 tops that was not equalled for 28 years. The bridge has a lighter distinction too: in 2015 it was named the fourth best bridge in England on which to play Poohsticks.

Lodore Falls, the Bowder Stone and Castle Crag below

The valley the road climbs out of holds the things most people combine with Watendlath, and reviewers are candid about which repay the stop.

Lodore Falls, fed by Watendlath Beck, is entirely weather-dependent and carries 4.4 from 169 Google reviews. A visitor in July 2026 called it a “Bit of an anti climax. Only a trickle of water and an unclear route to get there,” and another that month reported, “It’s been a dry few weeks so the water is very low.” Go after rain, or expect little.

The Bowder Stone, 4.4 from 489 Google reviews, is a short uphill walk from its car park — a visitor in July 2026 put it at “Roughly quarter mile uphill to the stone and lovely scenery” and said it can be combined with the riverside into a circular route. The rating is dragged down by parking rather than by the rock: one visitor in July 2026 wrote that National Trust membership makes the car park free, while another that month objected at length to what non-members are charged to leave a car there.

Castle Crag, 4.8 from 135 Google reviews, is the walk of the group. A visitor in June 2026 described it as “the smallest of the Wainwrights, but by no means lacking in scenic drama or challenge”, with switchbacks up slate scree and views over the Jaws of Borrowdale. Not everyone enjoyed the ground: a visitor in August 2025 said “the route up was bad due to having to traverse up a load of slate”. Millican Dalton’s Caves, a scenic spot at 4.8 from 26 Google reviews, are in the same valley.

A Norse barn name, a novelist’s farm and a painting in the Tate

The name is Old Norse, vatn-endi-hlaða, “water-end-barn” — a fair description of what is still there.

Farming is not decorative here. The traditional Lakeland farm at Watendlath is rented out by the National Trust, and, as on the Trust’s other Lakeland farms, the herd of Herdwick sheep belongs to the Trust rather than the farmer, changing hands with each tenant. The policy exists to keep the rare breed going.

The farmhouse has been borrowed twice by artists. Sir Hugh Walpole used Fold Head Farm as the fictional home of Judith Paris in his Herries Saga, four novels published in the early 1930s. Dora Carrington painted Farm at Watendlath, now in the Tate, after spending a summer holiday there in 1921 with her husband and their friends — among them Gerald Brenan, with whom she developed a mutual attraction; the identity of the two figures in white in the picture is not known. Edmund Casson’s poem The Wise Kings of Borrowdale gets at the same scale, naming a farm, a slated barn, a waterfall and a pebbly tarn.

Getting there from Keswick

By road, the only approach on record is the minor single-track road off the B5289 Borrowdale road, up over Ashness Bridge. Take the passing places seriously, and think twice if your vehicle is large.

Nothing in the sources behind this guide establishes a scheduled bus or a train serving Watendlath, so plan on driving, cycling or walking from Keswick unless you can confirm a service locally. Keswick itself has no railway station — the line closed in 1972 — so visitors without a car reach town by bus from Penrith, and the last stretch up the valley is a separate problem.