Escorted Coach Holidays in the Lake District
The Lake District fits England's highest ground, its deepest lake and a great deal of literary history into an area you can cross in a morning. Our tours settle into one hotel for four nights and go out each day — Hill Top, Dove Cottage, Rydal Mount, the clipped yews at Levens Hall — with a cruise on Windermere somewhere in the week.
Travel is by private coach with the same driver throughout, so nobody spends the holiday hunting for a parking space in Bowness. Breakfast and evening meals are included, and the days are paced to leave time to look at things properly.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Lake District Tours
The tours on this page run to five days, which means four nights in one hotel with excursions out each day. Staying put for the whole week means you unpack once, and there is no repacking halfway through. Breakfast and evening meals are included, along with private coach travel and the services of your driver throughout. Exact departure dates change through the season, so ask us what is currently open.
No, but it makes a difference to the price on the day. Several of the properties we visit — Hill Top, Hawkshead, Sizergh, Wordsworth House — belong to the National Trust, and entrance is included for members who bring their card. If you are not a member, you pay the admission charge at the door. Levens Hall, Brantwood and Leighton Hall are privately owned; ask us how entrance is handled on the tour you are considering.
Several of our Lake District tours set aside a number of single rooms at no supplement, which are allocated as bookings come in. They do go early, particularly on spring and autumn departures. Solo travellers are a normal part of these groups rather than an exception, and the shared evening meal makes the first day easier. Ask us which departures still have a no-supplement single available.
These are not walking holidays, but they are not entirely sedentary either. Expect gravel paths and slopes in the gardens, cobbles in Hawkshead and Grasmere, stairs at Hill Top and Rydal Mount, and a short walk from the coach to the boat landing at Bowness. Most days give you the choice of the full visit or a bench and a view. If you have concerns about a particular property, ask us before you book and we will tell you honestly what it involves.
Breakfast every morning and an evening meal every evening at the hotel, taken together as a group. Lunches are not included, which leaves you free to eat where you happen to be — a pub in Grasmere, the tea room at Levens Hall, or a sandwich on the pier. Special dietary requirements are usually straightforward for the hotels to handle, but tell us at the time of booking so we can pass it on.
Yes. Any of our Lake District itineraries can be run as a private group for a gardening club, U3A branch, church group or a set of friends, with the coach and the hotel to yourselves. Dates, the order of the excursions and the pace can be adjusted to suit the party. Tell us roughly how many of you there are and when you would like to travel, and we will put together a price.
Following Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter
Two writers shaped the way the world pictures this landscape, and both are on our itineraries. Wordsworth was born in the Georgian house on Cockermouth's main street in 1770, wrote much of his finest work at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, and spent his last thirty-seven years at Rydal Mount, where he laid out the garden himself and where the terraces he built are still there to walk.
Beatrix Potter bought Hill Top at Near Sawrey in 1905 with the royalties from Peter Rabbit. She left it to the National Trust with instructions that it be kept as she had it, so the rooms are small, crowded with her own furniture and visited in timed groups. Hawkshead, where Wordsworth went to grammar school, holds the Trust's gallery of her drawings, and the World of Beatrix Potter at Bowness tells the stories for anyone travelling with grandchildren in mind.
Houses and gardens on the itineraries
The Lakes are unusually rich in houses that are still furnished and still lived in, and several of ours are the reason people book the tour in the first place.
- Levens Hall — an Elizabethan house wrapped around a medieval pele tower, with topiary laid out by Guillaume Beaumont in 1694 and clipped to broadly the same shapes ever since.
- Sizergh — home to the Strickland family for some 750 years, with a limestone rock garden known for its ferns.
- Brantwood — John Ruskin's house above Coniston Water, bought unseen in 1871, with the view down the lake he thought the finest in England.
- Leighton Hall — a Gothic front on an older house, still home to the family who founded Gillow of Lancaster.
- Stagshaw Garden — a steep woodland garden above Windermere, planted for rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias.
Where a property belongs to the National Trust, entrance is included for members; if you are not a member there is an admission charge on the day.
Why a coach suits the Lakes
This is a difficult part of England to drive yourself around, which is precisely why coach travel works so well here. The lanes to Near Sawrey are narrow and walled, Hill Top's own car park is tiny and its tickets are timed, and by eleven o'clock on an August morning Bowness and Ambleside have run out of spaces. Our drivers know which routes take a coach and which do not, and where to set down within walking distance of the door.
The other advantage is simpler. On the run along Windermere or up towards Grasmere, you get to look at the water and the fells instead of at the wing mirrors of an oncoming caravan. The same driver stays with the group for the week, so by the third day he knows who likes to sit at the front.
Windermere, Grasmere and Kendal
Windermere is England's longest lake at a little over ten miles, and the cruise on it is included on our tours. The launches work between Bowness, Ambleside and Lakeside, and from the water you see the shoreline as the Victorians first saw it — boathouses, wooded islands and the fells rising behind Claife Heights.
Grasmere is small, grey-stone and walkable: Wordsworth's grave in St Oswald's churchyard, and Sarah Nelson's gingerbread still made to her 1854 recipe in the old village school by the gate. Kendal, on the southern edge of the National Park, is the working town of the area, with a ruined castle on its hill and its own mint cake. Our hotels have included the Lakeland Kendal Hotel and the Damson Dene at Bowness-on-Windermere, both used as a single base for the whole stay.
