Pubs with Rooms in Windermere & Bowness

Windermere is England’s largest natural lake by surface area — 10.5 miles end to end — and the town at its northern end shares the name, though most of the pubs, and most of the lakeshore itself, are actually a mile down the hill in Bowness-on-Windermere. The two have grown together into one continuous stretch of shops, guesthouses and pubs, and most visitors don’t distinguish between them.

All three pubs on this page are in Bowness rather than Windermere proper: the Royal Oak and the Albert are traditional pubs a short walk from the water, while the Angel Inn looks straight out across the lake towards the Langdale Pikes.

Bowness itself is genuinely built around the lake in a way few of the other Lake District towns are — the piers where Windermere Lake Cruises’ boats leave for Ambleside and Lakeside, the Windermere Jetty Museum’s collection of historic steamboats, and the World of Beatrix Potter attraction are all within a few minutes’ walk of each other, and of every pub on this page. Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s own farmhouse at Near Sawrey, is a short ferry crossing away on the lake’s western shore — one of the more genuine literary pilgrimages in the country, not a manufactured tie-in.

Windermere has its own railway station, the terminus of a branch line from Oxenholme on the West Coast Main Line — a genuinely useful way to arrive without a car, though Bowness itself is still a mile’s walk or a short bus ride from the station.