Escorted Holidays in Lakes, Fjords and National Parks
These are the holidays where the view is the point. The tours on this page take in Windermere and the Cumbrian fells, the Peak District, Eryri and the north Wales coast, the Scottish Highlands, the Julian Alps, the Norwegian fjords and volcanic ground in Iceland and Lanzarote.
They travel by coach, by mountain and heritage railway, by lake steamer and in some cases by ship. Most are short holidays based in one or two hotels, with a driver-guide, a set itinerary of excursions, meals and listed entrance fees included. You are taken to the viewpoints and given time to stand and look at them.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Landscapes & Nature Tours
More than a city break, less than a walking holiday. You will be on your feet for garden and house visits, coastal viewpoints and town centres, typically in stretches of half an hour to an hour with the coach nearby. Some sites have slopes, cobbles or steps that cannot be avoided. Nothing involves hill climbing or scrambling. If you want to know about a particular itinerary before booking, ask us and we will go through it day by day./answer},{
Several of our British tours visit National Trust properties, and the itineraries note that entrance is covered if you are a member. Arrangements for non-members vary between tours and departures, so please ask us before you book rather than assume. It is worth mentioning your membership when you enquire, as it can affect what you pay.
Yes, and many people do. Open Group departures are made up largely of couples and solo travellers who have not met before, and the shared coach and evening meal make it easy company. A number of our British tours set aside single rooms with no supplement, though how many depends on the tour and the date. Ask us which departures still have one available.
They are different seasons. Norway's fjords are at their best from late spring to early autumn, when the days are long, the waterfalls are full from snowmelt and the fjord water is calm. The aurora needs dark skies, so the season runs from roughly late September through to March. No operator can promise you will see the lights; a good itinerary simply puts you in the right place with time to try.
It is Britain, Norway and the Alps, so it happens. Mountain railways and boat cruises occasionally cannot run in high wind, and your driver will rearrange the day where it is possible to do so. Most itineraries mix outdoor viewpoints with houses, gardens, museums and towns, which gives some flexibility. Where a specific visit cannot go ahead, we will tell you at the time what the alternative is.
Yes. Any of these itineraries can be run as a Private Group, with your club, society or group of friends taking the whole coach. That gives you a departure point and date that suit you, and the itinerary can be adjusted to your interests, whether that means more time in the gardens or a longer stop at a viewpoint. Tell us roughly how many you are and where you would like to start.
Lake District Tours by Coach
The Lake District rewards being driven. The roads are narrow, the passes are slow, and parking at Grasmere or Hawkshead in July is a test of patience. Our tours base themselves near Windermere or Kendal and work outwards, which means you see Hill Top, Beatrix Potter's small farmhouse at Near Sawrey, without having queued for a space.
Wordsworth appears more than once. Dove Cottage at Grasmere, where he wrote much of his best work, Rydal Mount where he lived for nearly forty years, and Wordsworth House at Cockermouth, the Georgian townhouse where he was born.
Gardens feature too. The topiary at Levens Hall has been clipped to broadly the same shapes since the 1690s, and Stagshaw is at its best in late spring when the azaleas and rhododendrons come out. A cruise on Windermere gives you the fells from the water, which is how they look best.
Britain's National Parks and Coastlines
The Peak District was designated in 1951, the first national park in Britain, and it remains the most easily reached from the industrial north. Tours there combine the landscape with what sits inside it: Chatsworth, the Georgian crescent and thermal water at Buxton, the market town of Bakewell, and Lyme with its deer park.
In Wales, Eryri is approached by rail as much as by road. The rack railway from Llanberis has been climbing Yr Wyddfa since 1896, and there is the Llanberis lake line, a cruise on the Menai Strait, Conwy Castle and Portmeirion, the Italianate village Clough Williams-Ellis spent fifty years building.
Further afield in the programme: the Cairngorms and Perthshire from Pitlochry, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, Exmoor and the North Devon cliffs, and the Jurassic Coast, where Durdle Door, Lulworth Cove and Chesil Beach lay out roughly 185 million years of geology in walkable order.
Norwegian Fjords and the Far North
Bergen makes a sensible base for the fjords. The Fløibanen funicular takes you up Mount Fløyen in a few minutes for the view over the harbour and the wooden warehouses of Bryggen, and Grieg's villa at Troldhaugen sits above the lake south of the city.
From there the country opens up. Sognefjord is Norway's longest and deepest, and the water is startlingly still on a calm morning. The Flåm Railway climbs from the fjord shore to the plateau at Myrdal in under an hour, through tunnels and past the Kjosfossen waterfall, and it is regularly named among the finest short rail journeys in Europe.
Some fjord and Scottish island itineraries travel by ship rather than coach, sailing from a UK port. Iceland sits in the same part of the programme, with the Golden Circle, the Blue Lagoon and the aurora season, which runs roughly from late September to March. Ask us what is currently scheduled.
Alpine Lakes and Volcanic Islands
Lake Bled is the one people picture: the church on its island, the castle on the cliff, the Julian Alps behind. Bohinj, half an hour further into Triglav National Park, is larger, quieter and less photographed, and our Slovenian tour takes in both alongside Ljubljana and a cheese farm in the Bohinj valley.
Austria's lake country works on the same principle, with Chiemsee and Lake Wolfgang, a steam train, a cog railway up the Schafberg and a salt mine. The Italian Dolomites, a UNESCO site since 2009, bring vineyards and chestnut woods below those vertical limestone walls.
For winter, Lanzarote is the outlier and a good one. A UNESCO biosphere reserve where the eruptions of the 1730s left a landscape of black lava fields, lava tubes at Cueva de los Verdes, and the work of César Manrique built into the rock itself.
