Lake District Hiking: The Fells Behind the Lakes
Scafell Pike, Striding Edge, Catbells and Buttermere lead this Lake District hiking guide to the best fells, the valleys to sleep in and the quiet months.
Jon
Published August 11, 2026
Edited October 14, 2026
15 min read
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You came for the lakes. Three hours out of Wasdale Head you are standing on a boulder field at 978 metres, the highest ground in England, and the water you walked past at breakfast is a dark sliver far below. The lakes are the least of it. The real Lake District is up here.
We walk it three ways: Lake District Escape spends five days around Ullswater, Lake District & the Roof of England crosses the district in seven, and the Coast to Coast Classic walks through it on the way to the North Sea. All three are self-guided, with your luggage moved ahead by road. For the bigger picture, see hiking in the UK.
Quick facts:
Where: Cumbria, England, about 2,360 square kilometres holding every English fell over 900 metres
What: Fell days, ridge walks and lakeshore paths, with valley inns to walk between
How difficult: Harder than the heights suggest; a normal day is 15 kilometres with 900 metres of climb, and nothing needs acclimatisation
When: April to October, with late May and September the best windows
Best Lake District Hiking Routes
These are the eight days people talk about. Each fits inside a single day. Slot them into a walking week instead of building a week around them. New to fells? Start on Catbells. Finish, weather allowing, on a ridge with the word edge in its name.
1. Scafell Pike
Height: 978 m · Approach: Wasdale Head, about 900 m up in under 5 km · Best for: standing on the roof of England
England's highest mountain is a summit that disappoints anyone expecting a peak. What you find is a broad boulder field with a raised cairn. No soil, no path. Cairns are your only guide. Sca Fell next door, at 964 metres, is a separate mountain. Confusing the two is a local rite of passage.
Allow 5 to 6 hours there and back from Wasdale Head. Expect company: this is the busiest mountain in England. In cloud the plateau turns genuinely serious. Our seven-day crossing sleeps at Wasdale Head the night before and climbs it on day five, then carries on down to Great Langdale, 15.5 kilometres with 950 metres of ascent in all.
2. Helvellyn and Striding Edge
Height: 950 m · Approach: Striding Edge, or the zig-zag path from Glenridding · Best for: a head for heights
Nobody comes to Helvellyn for the summit. You come for the kilometre of rock that leads to it: Striding Edge, a narrow arete with a drop on both sides and a short down-climb near the end, and somewhere out on the crest you look straight down into Red Tarn and understand why the route is famous.
It is graded an easy scramble. It is also where Lakeland mountain rescue is called out most often. In wind, ice or with a nervous friend, take the zig-zags from Glenridding instead. You lose nothing. Lake District Escape is based on Ullswater right below it, so you choose your route on the day.
3. Catbells
Height: 451 m · Approach: Hawes End, about 90 minutes to the top · Best for: your first fell
The most climbed fell in the Lake District. It is the right first summit for almost anybody, on a path that needs no navigation, and the reward is the whole of Derwent Water below you, Borrowdale closing to the south and Skiddaw across the water, all for about an hour and a half of walking.
Beat the mid-morning crowds. Take the launch over from Keswick instead of hunting for a parking space, and you start the walk from the water.
4. The Old Man of Coniston
Height: 803 m · Approach: Coniston village, through the Coppermines Valley · Best for: mines, quarries and a lake view
The most industrial mountain in England. You climb out of Coniston past spoil heaps, wheel pits and the flooded workings of a copper industry that ran from the sixteenth century into the twentieth, then beside a slate quarry still being worked, until the summit cairn appears on its platform of quarried slate.
From the top, Coniston Water lies spread out below you and the Scafell group stands to the north west. Our seven-day crossing walks through the same valley on its way to Boot.
5. The Fairfield Horseshoe
Height: 873 m · Approach: Ambleside loop, about 17 km with close to 1,000 m of ascent · Best for: a full ridge day without a car
Leave Ambleside, climb Low Pike and High Pike onto Fairfield, then come back down the opposite arm over Hart Crag and Dove Crag. Almost all of it is grass above 600 metres. You finish exactly where you started. In cloud, though, the two arms are easy to confuse near the top.
6. Great Gable
Height: 899 m · Approach: Wasdale Head by Sty Head and the Breast Route · Best for: the view Scafell Pike does not give you
From Wasdale Head it looks like a near-perfect pyramid. Everybody photographs it. The usual route climbs about 900 metres in roughly four kilometres. On the southern flank stands Napes Needle. Its first ascent, in 1886, is widely treated as the start of British rock climbing. Climb Gable if Scafell Pike disappointed you.
7. Sharp Edge on Blencathra
Height: 868 m · Approach: Sharp Edge, or Hall's Fell ridge · Best for: experienced scramblers on a dry day
Blencathra stands apart at the northern edge of the district, looking across the Solway to Scotland. Sharp Edge is harder than Striding Edge. Genuinely harder: narrower, more exposed, with polished rock and a slabby traverse that has caused serious accidents. Wet or windy? Leave it unless you scramble, and take Hall's Fell ridge instead.
8. The Langdale Pikes
Height: 736 m at Harrison Stickle · Approach: Old Dungeon Ghyll, about 650 m up in under 3 km · Best for: short, steep and very old
Brutally steep and mostly on pitched stone, this is the skyline on the national park's own logo.
The surprise waits on the flank of Pike o' Stickle, where around 4,000 years ago people quarried hard volcanic tuff and worked it into axe heads traded across Britain, which makes the ground you are panting up an industrial site far older than any slate mine. The scree is still full of stone flakes.
Choosing a Valley Base
Pick the valley before the route. The valley decides what you can walk. The district is a dome: ice sat on the centre and cut valleys outward in every direction like spokes on a wheel, so that Wasdale and Borrowdale, eight kilometres apart as the crow flies, are separated by the highest ground in England.
Each spoke has its own rock and its own mood. Around Skiddaw in the north you get smooth, grassy slate whalebacks; the middle is volcanic crag and scree; the south turns to gentler limestone, slate and woodland. These five valleys are the ones worth sleeping in.
Ullswater bends through three reaches over about 14 kilometres
The second largest lake, about 14 kilometres of dog-leg water, with the best lakeshore walking in the district. The 11 kilometre eastern shore path from Howtown to Glenridding is often called the finest low-level walk in England, and no road runs on that side at all. Helvellyn rises above it, so you can spend one day at lake level and the next on an exposed ridge.
Ullswater bends through three reaches over about 14 kilometres
Buttermere and Crummock Water were one lake until sediment split them
Borrowdale runs south from Keswick and narrows into a gorge at the Jaws of Borrowdale. It is the wettest valley in England. Also the greenest, with oak on the slopes and a floor that floods. Over Honister Pass lie Buttermere and Crummock Water, once a single lake. The seven kilometre Buttermere circuit is the most photographed easy walk in the Lakes, and the car parks fill by nine.
Buttermere and Crummock Water were one lake until sediment split them
Wast Water is the deepest lake in England at about 79 metres
The serious one. Wast Water is the deepest lake in England at about 79 metres, with screes falling into it for nearly two kilometres. At the head: a hamlet, a church, an inn. Scafell Pike and Great Gable ring the lot. English rock climbing was invented here in the 1880s. No gift shop and no through road.
Wast Water is the deepest lake in England at about 79 metres
Birks Bridge over the River Duddon is a listed packhorse crossing
Most visitors never get here. The roads in cross passes at one in three. Eskdale climbs from the coast to the foot of Scafell past waterfalls and packhorse bridges, served since 1875 by a 15 inch gauge railway from Ravenglass, while the Duddon next door was Wordsworth's favourite valley, worth 34 of his sonnets. Expect more Herdwicks than people.
Birks Bridge over the River Duddon is a listed packhorse crossing
Coniston Water was a speed record course long before it was a view
Great Langdale is the classic central valley: a flat green floor, a famous inn and the shortest walk-in to high rock anywhere in the district. Coniston, to the south, is a working village built on copper and slate, with the Old Man behind it and Coniston Water in front, where Donald Campbell died chasing the water speed record in 1967.
Coniston Water was a speed record course long before it was a view
Why Is There Only One Lake?
Because only Bassenthwaite Lake is actually called a lake. Every other sheet of water here is a mere, a water or a tarn. Windermere, at 17 kilometres the largest natural lake in England, is a mere by name. Derwent Water is a water. Red Tarn is a tarn.
Nobody planned it. Norse settlers named the landscape they found, nobody ever got round to standardising it, and so when you tell your friends back home that you walked the lakes, a pedant can point out that you walked beside exactly one.
What Is a Wainwright?
A Wainwright is one of the 214 Lakeland fells in Alfred Wainwright's seven Pictorial Guides. Walking all of them is a lifelong project. He was a Kendal borough treasurer who, between 1955 and 1966, wrote and drew them in the evenings after his day job, every page handwritten and hand-illustrated, and he finished on schedule, to the week.
They are not the 214 highest fells. Just the ones he chose, which is half the charm and most of the arguments. You will hear "bagging the Wainwrights" in every pub in Cumbria. His own ashes were scattered on Haystacks, a 597 metre fell above Buttermere he named as his favourite.
He also devised the Coast to Coast in 1973, about 300 kilometres from St Bees on the Irish Sea to Robin Hood's Bay, and its Lakeland third is the hardest part of it, worth knowing because our Coast to Coast Classic walks the whole line in 15 days. It is the toughest thing we run in England.
What a Fell Day Feels Like
Steep, first of all. Lakeland paths go straight up the fall line. There are no switchbacks. The paths were worn in by feet and hooves over centuries rather than engineered, and your calves will tell you about it long before a normal day here, 15 kilometres with 900 metres of climb, is done.
Low down, the ground is stone pitching, boulders set by hand into a rough staircase that sheds water, some of it Victorian and some laid last summer by National Trust teams working from helicopter-dropped stone, and while it is easy enough going up, coming down it wet is where most twisted ankles happen. Pitching punishes the descent.
Higher up, the volcanic centre hands you block scree and bare slabs. Both turn greasy within minutes of rain. The tops of Scafell Pike and Bowfell have no soil at all. Up north it is grass and loose slate instead. Watch the gravel: it rolls like ball bearings on a steep descent.
Down in the valleys the soundtrack is sheep. Herdwicks are hefted: each flock learns its own patch of unfenced fell and keeps to it across generations, so the walls are not grazing boundaries. Walls mean stiles. A lowland day can hold dozens.
Before your first day on the tops, know these:
Cloud is the real hazard. The high plateaux have no paths, so carry a paper map and a compass and know how to take a bearing.
You can roam. Most of the high ground is open access land, shaded pale yellow on the OS Explorer maps OL4 to OL7.
Dogs go on a lead near sheep. From March to May the fells fill with lambs, and a ewe that runs from a dog can abort.
Rescue is volunteer-run. All 12 mountain rescue teams covering the Lake District are unpaid and charity-funded.
Our grades are honest. The five-day trip rates 2 out of 5 for fitness and technique; the seven-day crossing rates 3 for fitness and 4 for technique. The hiking difficulty guide explains what that feels like.
Why Is It So Wet?
Because the Atlantic hits it first. Weather rolls in from the west, meets the first high ground since Newfoundland and drops its load, which is why Seathwaite in Borrowdale is England's wettest inhabited place: roughly 3,500 millimetres a year, against about 600 in London.
That rain made the bog, the waterfalls, the moss and the shape of every path you will walk. In December 2015 Storm Desmond dropped 341 millimetres on Honister Pass in 24 hours. A United Kingdom record. Becks rise fast. The stream you crossed at breakfast can be impassable by teatime.
Pack a jacket rated for sustained rain, waterproof trousers and a dry bag inside your pack. Your jacket matters more than your boots.
The trick is to go east. The western valleys, Wasdale, Ennerdale and Borrowdale, are markedly wetter, while Ullswater and Haweswater sit in a rain shadow, so on a week when the west is drowning, shifting your walking east for a day or two can rescue the whole trip.
When to Go
Come in late May or September. The season runs from April to October, but the shoulder months beat the middle ones, because almost all of the 18 million or so visitors a year pour into a park that around 41,000 people call home in just two months, July and August.
When | What you get |
|---|---|
April | The season opens; lambs on the fells, so dogs stay on leads near sheep |
Late May | The driest ground and the longest light before the school holidays |
July and August | Peak crowds, car parks full by nine, swimming in cold clean lakes |
September | Colour, space and cheaper beds, with the weather holding more often than not |
October | The season's last month, and the time to walk Buttermere without the crowds |
December to March | Snow and ice on the high fells, avalanching gullies; Striding Edge needs an axe, crampons and the skill to use both |
Avoid bank holiday weekends if you have any choice, above all in Langdale, Buttermere and around Windermere, and if you swim, which is part of any Lakeland summer, stay inside the marked zones on Windermere and Derwent Water and watch for the national park's blue-green algae warnings in warm, still spells.
Getting There and Where to Sleep
Take the train and sleep in walkers' inns. This mountain area works without a car: trains from London, Manchester and Glasgow stop at Oxenholme, where a branch line runs into Windermere itself. Only the remote valley heads lag behind: Wasdale gets one summer bus, and Eskdale has its narrow-gauge railway.
From Windermere and Keswick, buses reach most valleys, including the 555 up the central spine, the 77 over Honister and the 508 to Glenridding at the foot of Helvellyn, and ferries cross Windermere, Ullswater and Derwent Water, so you can start a walk by stepping off a boat.
On our routes your bag goes by road while you walk between valleys, and you sleep in inns and small hotels such as the Temperance Inn in Ambleside, the Yewdale in Coniston and Burnthwaite at Wasdale Head. Britain has no denser walkers' accommodation, a legacy of the railway reaching Windermere in 1847. Your options:
Where to sleep | What to know |
|---|---|
Inns and small hotels | Drying rooms, boot stores, breakfast from seven, food served late enough to matter; book remote valley heads first, as Wasdale Head has a handful of rooms and nothing else for 15 km |
Youth hostels | Open to all ages; Black Sail, a former shepherd's bothy at the head of Ennerdale, can only be reached on foot |
Camping barns | A stone floor, a kettle and a roof on a working farm |
Campsites | Clustered in Langdale, Wasdale and Eskdale |
Bothies | Three of the five in England that the Mountain Bothies Association looks after; no booking, so carry a plan B |
Wild camping | No legal right (Dartmoor is the only place in England with one), but high camping above the intake walls is tolerated: one night, arrive late, leave early, no trace, no fire |
Ready to Hike the Lake District?
Pick the valley before the route. If you want lakeshore days, one big mountain and the option of Striding Edge, base yourself on Ullswater; if you want to cross the district properly and sleep under Scafell Pike, take the seven-day crossing. Either way, you walk with a daypack and choose your own start date.
All three of our Lake District walks include:
Inns and small hotels set up for walkers
Luggage moved ahead by road
A digital guidebook
GPS routes for every day
Your own start date
Browse all our walking holidays in England, or get in touch with our team and let's get you started.
Frequently Asked Questions
About this author
Jon is our travel advisor and an outdoor adventurer who is happiest on the move. While mountain biking is his personal passion, he thrives on crafting hiking adventures for others — planning routes and adding the little touches that turn a trip into a core memory.
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