Patterdale
The name gives it away before you arrive: Patterdale means Patrick's Valley, and the village sits at the southern end of Ullswater with the kind of quietness that makes you notice small things — the Friday mobile post office pulling into the hotel car park, Herdwick sheep on the fellside, a church built from local slate with sandstone edges. The population is around 500. There is one hotel, a youth hostel, a primary school.
What draws people is the land around it. Striding Edge begins here, the long airy ridge that leads up to Helvellyn. Alfred Wainwright's Coast to Coast Walk passes through. Wainwright called this his favourite valley in the Lake District, partly because it stays quieter than its neighbours.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to arrive on a weekday, catch the 508 from Penrith and walk straight off the bus onto the Helvellyn path. They eat at the Patterdale Hotel and take the long way back via Brothers Water — the only tarn in the valley, and one of the first pieces of the Lake District the National Trust ever acquired.
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Book directly at the providerHow Patterdale came to be
The valley appears in records around 1184 as Patrichesdale. Local tradition reaches further back, to a Saint Patrick said to have arrived in 432 AD and established a wooden church here, baptising converts at a nearby well. Historians treat that story with caution, but the name stuck.
The current Church of St Patrick was substantially rebuilt in 1852–53 by architect Anthony Salvin — the same architect who designed Patterdale Hall — at a cost of £1,485, consecrated by the Bishop of Carlisle on 3 November 1853. Built in Gothic Revival style from Lakeland slate with red sandstone dressings, it holds a Grade II listing and a more unusual distinction: it is reputed to be the first church in England lit by electricity, powered in the 1890s by the old Greenside Lead Mine. The traveller Celia Fiennes rode through Kirkstone Pass into the valley on horseback in 1698, leaving one of the earliest written accounts of the journey.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
July peaks around 19°C — good walking weather, with sunny stretches broken by showers. Annual rainfall is high at roughly 1,400 mm spread fairly evenly through the year, so a waterproof is sensible in any season; January can drop below freezing overnight.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.