Tarn Hows
Tarn Hows is one of the most celebrated and photographed landscapes in the entire Lake District National Park, and arguably in all of England. It is a serene, wooded tarn nestled among gentle hills in the central Lake District of Cumbria, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors each year with its almost impossibly picturesque scenery. The National Trust owns and manages the site, and it has become an emblem of the kind of carefully tended natural beauty that defines the Lake District. Despite its wild and timeless appearance, Tarn Hows is in many ways an engineered landscape, its current form the product of Victorian ingenuity and aesthetic ambition rather than pure geological chance.
The history of Tarn Hows is surprisingly intimate. What appears today as a single expansive lake was originally three smaller tarns known as Tom Gill tarns. In the nineteenth century, the landowner dammed the outflow stream to combine these into one larger, more dramatic body of water, transforming the site into the showpiece it remains today. The estate was later purchased by Beatrix Potter, the celebrated author and illustrator of Peter Rabbit, who was also a passionate conservationist and sheep farmer in the Lake District. When she died in 1943, she bequeathed Tarn Hows along with the majority of her landholdings — over four thousand acres in total — to the National Trust, fulfilling her deep commitment to preserving the landscape she had loved. This gift formed one of the most significant single donations in the Trust's history and helped secure the character of the central Lake District for future generations.
In person, Tarn Hows is a place of remarkable tranquillity and visual harmony. The water is dark and clear, reflecting the surrounding hills and the sky with a mirror-like quality on calm days. The shoreline is ringed with mature conifers and broadleaved trees, their reflections doubling the drama of the scene. Reeds and rushes fringe parts of the bank, and the gentle sound of water, birdsong and wind through the trees creates a contemplative atmosphere. In autumn the woodland around the tarn erupts in golds, russets and amber. In winter, when frost edges the grasses and the hills above are dusted with snow, the place takes on an austere, almost Nordic beauty. In summer, the light dances on the water and the meadows above the treeline are vivid green.
The surrounding landscape offers some of the most satisfying walking country in the Lake District. To the north-west, the summit of Coniston Old Man dominates the horizon, its rocky profile a constant presence above the softer, wooded lower ground. The village of Coniston lies roughly two miles to the south-west and is worth visiting for its associations with both John Ruskin, the great Victorian art critic who lived at Brantwood on the eastern shore of Coniston Water, and Donald Campbell, the speed record pioneer who died on Coniston Water in 1967. Hawkshead, the charming market village where William Wordsworth went to school, is a short drive to the north-east. Ambleside and Grasmere are also within easy reach, making Tarn Hows a natural centrepiece for exploring a wide swathe of the central Lakes.
A well-maintained circular footpath of approximately one and a half miles runs around the entire perimeter of the tarn, making it one of the most accessible walks in the national park. The path is surfaced and relatively level for most of its length, and the National Trust has worked to make it accessible for pushchairs and many wheelchair users, though some sections can be uneven. There is a National Trust car park at the site, which charges a fee for non-members, and the Trust also runs a Rambler bus service connecting Tarn Hows with nearby Hawkshead and Coniston during the summer months, an option that reduces congestion on the narrow lanes. The site can become very busy on weekends and during school holidays, and early morning visits in spring or autumn offer a far more peaceful experience as well as the best photographic light.
One of the more curious aspects of Tarn Hows is that its apparently natural landscape is in fact a meticulously managed one. The plantations of conifers, while beautiful, are not native to the area and the National Trust has gradually been introducing more native broadleaf species to diversify the woodland and improve biodiversity. The tarn itself supports brown trout and is managed as a fishery. The whole place is a living example of how the Lake District's landscapes have been shaped not only by geology and climate but by centuries of human intervention, an idea that sits at the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage designation the Lake District received in 2017. That designation recognised the area as a cultural landscape as much as a natural one, and Tarn Hows, with its blend of manufactured beauty and genuine wildness, exemplifies this perfectly. Few places in England are more quietly instructive about the relationship between people and the land they inhabit.