How to Spend a Weekend in Ambleside
At the top tip of Lake Windermere, this is the perfect destination for a weekend escape
STAY
Find real country house luxury at the excellent Rothay Manor whose chic country style will make you feel right at home. Its cosy crackling fires and squishy sofas are perfect for when you’ve exhausted yourselves outdoors, and there’s an award-winning restaurant here too. Book one of the garden suites with a private hot tub and enjoy views of the fells as you lie back in the bubbles. In the town’s centre, the elegant Melrose Guesthouse has eight ensuite bedrooms and serves an unbeatable Cumbrian breakfast to help you kickstart your day. It also offers free parking (essential in this busy town).
EAT
You’ll probably think you deserve a treat after all that fresh air and exercise, and you might well be right. That’s when you should head to the Michelin-starred Old Stamp House. This quirky, stone-walled, almost subterranean restaurant is in the cellar of an old house where Wordsworth worked as Distributor of Stamps. Now, the skilfully prepared, award-winning dishes have diners returning again and again. Also in town and more relaxed, but still worth trying out, is Dodds. Serving lunch and dinner, the evening menu here includes many of your favourite pizzas and pastas, but extends to a delicious lamb ragu gnocchi and an unmissable sticky toffee pudding to round everything off.
EXPLORE
At the northern end of Lake Windermere, this busy market town, surrounded by lakeland fells, is in the heart of the national park. As you would imagine, with easy access to Grasmere, Keswick and Windermere there are so many things to do you could stay for a month and still have only experienced a quarter of them. Take to the water, hike the fells, scramble the gorges and cycle the many tracks, but don’t miss the Armitt Museum for an insider guide to the history of life and the arts in the Lakes, and check out Rydal Mount and Gardens, home to poet William Wordsworth for nearly 40 years.
–Don’t Miss–
Every visitor should take a trip on the Windermere Steamer to enjoy the amazing views from the water. Trips on what is England’s largest lake can last between 45 minutes and three hours, or you can buy a Freedom of the Lake pass which means you can hop on and off at various points on the lake all day long.
Bridge House is a tiny house over Stock Beck in the centre of Ambleside and is one of the most photographed buildings in the whole of the Lake District. Originally built as an apple store in 1723, it’s now owned by the National Trust and is open daily between Easter and October, and in the 19th century was home to a family of 11. History buffs will love Ambleside’s Roman Fort which dates back to the 2nd century.
