OS Explorer map OL6, The English Lakes – South-western area: Coniston, Ulverton & Barrow-in-Furness – I do not own this map, and had not visited it before starting this blog. Visited for this post 25th September 2025.
Map area link. Google maps location links: Coniston, the Old Man of Coniston, Windermere, Ambleside, Kendal, Broughton-in-Furness.
Regular readers may be familiar with my friends from my first undergrad, namely (or blog-nicknamely) Little S, No Longer Hairy, Lapsed Lawyer, Unicorn and Ex-Linguistician. We do quite well for a friend group that lives dispersed across the country – London, Nottingham, Edinburgh, two in Cheltenham and me in Moreton-in-Marsh – and usually meet up twice a year or so. We also, more infrequently, go on a group holiday. Last time was in the Peak District in September 2022, which didn’t get featured on this blog since we only went to map areas I’d already posted about. We thought it was about time for another, so came for a long weekend (Thursday to Monday) in the Lake District this year. It was very nice!
I came up in the car with Ex-Linguistician and Unicorn on Thursday afternoon, they having collected me at Worcestershire Parkway railway station, fairly near our homes in Cheltenham and Moreton. A four-hour drive later four and a half hours later we joined No Longer Hairy at our accommodation for the long weekend, a big duplex flat above a shop in Coniston. We had a quiet evening in on the Thursday and then Unicorn, No Longer Hairy and I filled Friday morning by going on a walk up the mountain the Old Man of Coniston, before lunchtime when we’d go to collect Lapsed Lawyer from the station in Windermere.
Somehow, despite having travelled widely enough in Britain to be 58% of the way through visiting to every Explorer map area, and despite how prominent a holiday destination the Lake District is, and despite the fact I like hiking, I’ve spent very little time there. Other than brief stopovers while travelling to and from Scotland, I’ve visited the Lakes before only on one holiday way back in 2011 – narrated in my one previous Lake District post, about map OL7 (the southeastern area), and one trip to the Center Parcs up there even further back in 2007.
Now, this trip almost didn’t count for any new map areas, in that Coniston itself is in the overlap between maps OL6 and OL7 (so wouldn’t count for a visit under The Rules), and almost everywhere we visited in the trip was in OL7 or in the same overlap. However, we did enter the unique region of OL6 twice; one for that climb up the Old Man, and for one pub dinner later in the trip.
It was a great walk! Not too long, we were only out for about 3 hours, having done a short car hop to a car park near the mountain’s base. The weather was great – cool, sunny and not too windy, perfect walking weather – except that the very top of the mountain was in cloud. The views back over Coniston Water were great.
We’d ascended from the northeast, on a very well-used seeming path, passing maybe six or so other people on the way up, but came down to the southwest, looping around back to the car. The way down was much quieter and took us through the really pretty little high valley of the delightfully-named Goat Water, which I enjoyed.
Following the walk, the four of us drove over to Windermere, had lunch in a café, and Lapsed Lawyer joined us off her train. In the afternoon, the weather was looking a little iffy and we needed no more than a very gentle walk with a smooth, level path, so we went to Tarn Hows, a National Trust property centering around a large, purposefully aesthetically set-up tarn, with a path running around it.
It was very nice! The weather was no more than a little uncooperative, and we were bemused by some signs to a “waterfall” which turned out to be no more than a run of little drops in a stream no more than about two feet tall; but the surroundings were very pretty and the path was good.
As we were walking around, and regularly throughout the rest of the trip, instigated by No Longer Hairy, we ended up getting oddly into composing silly haiku-like verses. I wrote down a few of them later, but alas I don’t think any of the best ones. Still, here’s one.
Poetic [Freddie]*
Haikus drop like autumn leaves
A new skill, perhaps?
* “Freddie” is a fake two-syllable name used in place of No Longer Hairy’s real two-syllable name.
On the Saturday, it was back to Windermere again to collect Little S. We visited the Windermere branch of Lakeland, a national cookshop chain. The Windermere location is the original branch and is just huge – Lakelands are so easy to get sucked into and leave with five cool expensive kitchen gadgets. We had a bit more of a wander around the town and were brave enough to sit outside and eat ice cream in the chilly September weather. The ice cream was from The Little Ice-cream Shop, which I really liked – it just had such a huge array of flavours, some of them really interesting. I got peach and basil flavour, which was great.
Saturday dinner was the second occasion that we visited somewhere unique to this map area, as we drove twenty minutes out to Broughton-in-Furness for dinner at The Old King’s Head pub.
Now, I was a bit bemused by this when we were planning it: I’ve never really got into looking up ratings of cafés, hotels, restaurants and the like, and usually just find a convenient place and think “that’ll do”. Especially with food I suppose it’s that, except in rare cases where I’m tracking down something specific I’m excited by, usually if I’m eating out it’s just because it’s convenient, necessary, filling time, or a way to spend time with people. I do absolutely get excited about fun food, but most of the time, food is just about having something at least reasonably nice; and that’s a bar that practically any food I’d get in a restaurant will meet. On a holiday, I’d much rather spend my money on experiences, on being able to go to a place at all, on being able to travel with the people I want to travel with, on choosing an interesting destination, or (if I’m with people) on choosing accommodation that’ll be a nice place for us to spend time together in; than on nice food and drink or on the accommodation being fancy. And I usually go self-catering and am very happy to cook dinners, and have packed lunches or supermarket sandwiches, eating out only occasionally.
On this occasion, there were several pubs in Coniston we hadn’t tried yet, so I was unsure of the need for a twenty-minute drive, but Ex-Linguistician, whose usual approach is to read reviews and find somewhere that seems particularly nice, thought they seemed underwhelming and identified this place instead. And I have to say, it was a situation calculated to change my opinions. I ended up having a vegetable pie with mash, veg gravy; and I’d actually had something very similar the evening before in a Coniston pub, namely a cheese and onion pie with mash. And the one at the Broughton-in-Furness pub was just so much nicer. I’m not saying I’m changing how I’ll usually do things; the same things still matter to me, but it was a great demonstration of what I’m missing out on, and what can be nice about travelling a different way. Thanks, Ex-Linguistician!
Peaceful Lakeside night
Frustration builds in [Freddie]
Slow driver in front.
– Composed on the drive back from the pub
On the Sunday morning, we went on a boat trip on Coniston Water, on the steam yacht Gondola, which was very cool: a refurbished Victorian steam-powered tourist boat, built for tours on Coniston Water in 1859.
I do enjoy how in Lakeland, it’s been a visitor attraction for so long that being a tourist there feels like being part of the history; you’re following in the steps of tourists for hundreds of years. At Tarn Hows, there were lots of trees full of embedded coins, that visitors had been leaving for ages. And the views were good too!
I think I’ll leave it there in terms of telling you in detail about specific things we did. There were other things: we had a wander around Coniston itself, seeing an antiques fair. We visited Kendal on the Sunday before dropping Little S at the station for her to travel home. No Longer Hairy, Lapsed Lawyer and I had a twilight walk up a valley on Sunday evening and, on the Monday, visited a waterfall in Ambleside before travelling back southwards. But I think I’ve done enough writing for now, and will just leave you with some photos. It was a really nice trip, and I’m very glad the six of us still do these.
Visiting all the maps! 