Seathwaite Farm: An Idyllic Lake District Campsite, But It’s a Scary Drive to Get There!

For hiking and hill walking from your motorhome or campervan in the Lake District’s Cumbrian fells, the basic site at Seathwaite Farm Camping is in a stunning base location folks! It’s the start of a huge network of trails, including a beautiful hike up to the top of England on the rugged Scafell Pike.

The farm is south of Derwent Water, about 10 miles from Keswick (N54.499842, W3.183709). It’s not the easiest place to get to in a motorhome (see below) but it’s worth it folks.

I’m sat outside the van typing this with cracking views of the sweeping green hillsides, lined with implausibly-placed stone walls on near vertical slopes.

The bleating of sheep being sheared in the farmer’s barn is (just about) being drowned out by the nippers playing in the boulder-lined river pools behind me.

The farmer charges £6 per person per night, plus a fiver for the first night for your van (a bit of a weird charging mechanism, but we’re not complaining). Payment is via an honesty box, so bring cash with you. There’s no electricity, loo disposal or grey water point, but there are public (National Trust) toilets near the barns, open 24 hours. Fresh water is from a blue downpipe mounted on the front of the barn. It’s not marked as drinking water but we had no issues with it.

You guys won’t get this post until we’ve left the site though, as there’s no phone or internet signal here. To get our emails it’s a 1.5-mile uphill hike, which we’ve done a few times to stay in touch with home. We’re not completely cut off while we’re at the site though. The satellite dish goes up in the evening for a quick update on what’s going on out there, and to watch a bit of telly after some day hikes in the mountains. There is also a phone box by the toilets, but at a minimum charge of 60p, we opted for the hike to make our calls.

The farm isn’t taking tent campers at the moment (and the camping barn and showers are closed), so the huge camping field is available just for self-contained vans. We’ve been here through the weekend and Saturday night was quite busy with about 30 vans and the odd cheeky tent (almost all gone by Sunday afternoon). The site also provides parking for walkers at £5 a day, and on a sunny Saturday in July there were around 100 cars. Even then there was a ton of room available.

Getting to Seathwaite Farm Camping

To get to the farm campsite, head down the B5289 east of Derwent Water from Keswick, then turn off just before the tiny village of Seatoller (and the steep, twisting Honister Pass just beyond it). Follow the single track road south for a mile or so and you’ll arrive at the farm gates. Easy, no?

Erm, no, not for me anyway! The B5289 is wide enough for two cars in most places but gets tight in others. We’re 2.2m wide, 6m long and are left hand drive, so we’re reasonably big and our visibility isn’t perfect. Almost as soon as we turned onto the B5289 we hit a straight but narrow section we’ll refer to as ‘wing mirror alley’!

I imagine you’ve already worked out why. We got a close look at all the numerous bits of glass and plastic on the tarmac, evidence of a number of wing mirror clashes, after a coming together with an oncoming campervan. I was as far left as I could get and had my foot firmly planted on the brake at the time. We’ve not hit mirrors many times, but once is enough to have you wincing every time someone flies towards you a gnat’s whisker away.

I can remember two lorries once hitting mirrors just in front of us as we headed along an implausably fast road through a tiny village somewhere abroad, Italy I think, where bypasses haven’t yet been invented. The guy’s mirror on the lorry in front of us swung around and smashed his side window, showering him with glass. Luckily he was OK, but it’s made me very wary of hitting mirrors at speed, or at all!

This time I just couldn’t avoid the collision. It was just a clip, rather than the shocking BANG we got a few months back when our mirror hit a post embedded in a hedge on the way to Edale. The oncoming van sadly lost their wing mirror glass, ours escaped unscathed. We guess they hit the metal post ours is mounted on (in which case we were inches from a proper crash). I walked back up the road to ask if they wanted to exchange insurance details but they just wanted to get going again, so we left it at that. Not nice, and the rest of the narrow road ahead now felt even narrower and it was a relief when we finally turned off it.

The small road down to the site from the B5289 is single track, and is really tight at the start as you cross a small stone bridge. I’d eyeballed it on Google Streetview, and could see the first few hundred metres were long-reverse territory if you met anyone coming the other way. In the end this bit of road was the least difficult. It opened out quickly and has grass verges which tons of hikers use for freebie parking, but there’s still enough space to pass. Almost all the cars seem to arrive before 10am, and we met no-one on the really narrow bits.

Arriving at the farm itself, you head through the gates after the turning circle, and immediately turn tight before the barns. Follow the track past the honesty payment box, then over the small concrete bridge over the stream which bisects the field. Then pick a spot anywhere you fancy in the big old field. It’s fairly level, but we used ramps to get just right for a few day’s stay.

There’s no reception office. We never spoke to the farmer in 6 days (although we did see him a few times herding flocks of sheep around on his quadbike), we just paid in the honesty box when we left. There are no shops anywhere near the site either, so either come full of grub, or plan to walk back to the B road and grab the bus from Seatoller 10 miles back up into Keswick.

Most of the other vans were VW T5-sized, with a few larger panel vans thrown in. There were a handful of other motorhomes though, including a few 7m+ ones, so we weren’t the biggest rig (phew). The farm has a massive sheep trailer parked by the barns too, so it’s possible to get large stuff down there.

Hiking in the Cumbrian Fells

The fells (mountains) are the big draw, the strong attraction which overrode my fear of the narrow roads. Trails and paths lead direct from the farm gates to a huge network of routes and summits to the south, east and west.

Scafell Pike, England’s highest mountain at 3209 feet, is 5 miles from the campsite. The ‘Corridor Route’ which takes you up the mountain from Seathwaite isn’t the fastest or easiest track up the hill, but it has fewer hikers as a result.

Also, you get tons of really incredible views in clear weather, which we were lucky to get. The route itself starts about 2.5 miles south from near the Styhead Tarn mountain lake but like all the other routes, it’s not marked with signposts, paint etc. Just a few stone cairns show the main trails, so it’s a good idea to bring a map or download the area on the free maps.me offline app on your phone.

The turn off from the main path is easy to miss, I had to backtrack to find it even though I’d read up on the Corridor route on the Three Peaks Association website. The hike up isn’t easy, with a steady ascent on stony, uneven paths, but it doesn’t take much skill either.

The most ‘technical’ part of the route is a stone ‘step’ south of the tarn, a drop of maybe 4 metres down the rock which requires care and using your hands, but no climbing skills or kit.

The final climb to the summit is an easy but long scramble up a path across loose rock with a couple of false summits to sap your willpower! Children and poodles were smashing it though, so it’s not too difficult. That said, I’m no expert on these hills and the official websites all suggest doing research on routes, navigation, weather, maps, clothing, drinks etc before you head up.

The weather’s perfect at the moment, we’re really lucky but we’ve still seen mountain rescue and the air ambulance helicopter out twice in the few days we’ve been here. On one of them it took off right in front of us before hammering off down the valley, creating an arm-hair-raising buzz, carrying a hiker with a broken ankle to hospital.

Great Gable is an easier 2.5-mile hike away, and has fantastic views of the Cumbrian Coast, the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man and Scotland. There are two routes to it from the campsite. One heads up to Styhead Tarn and then up a seemingly never-ending series of stone steps to the summit.

Another route to Great Gable crosses a wooden bridge from a corner of the camping field and up a steep hillside by the Sourmilk Gill waterfall. That part’s a bit of a physical challenge with a short awkward bit but it gifts cracking panoramic views of the campsite.

At the top it levels off with a few more steep sections until you reach a series of stone cairns directing you to the summit of Green Gable (itself with panoramic views). From there it’s an awkward descent on loose rock (I hate this stuff, poles help) and then a very steep climb up to Great Gable. My vertigo kicked in a bit on this route, and I much preferred the path from the tarn.

Another route we’ve done leads from the site around the hulk of Seathwaite Fell, which stands huge to the south at 601m. There’s a circular route to it, up to Styhead Tarn, turning south-east and then along an out-and back flattish route to the summit. We can confirm there is a good 3G signal on Three there, as we got our admin done in the shade of a rock, with Derwent Water a tiny pool in the distance.

Back to the main trail, head south-east until you hit the trail alongside the small gorge cut by Ruddy Gill (‘gill’ is the name for a mountain stream), then enjoy the long descent back to the farm.

There are a ton of other trails and summits to explore, most take at least a few hours. Some hikers arrive in the evening and head off with large packs. The farmer has a pricelist which includes overnight car parking, allowing for wild camping or bivouacking up high under the stars.

I met one chap who’d done a couple of nights up there, purifying his own water. The closest we’ve gotten was setting our alarm for 1am and stumbling out of our comfy double bed to peer up at the faint Milky Way for a bit. Our blurry eyes tried to comprehend we were looking at millions of stars, the edge of a galaxy.

We stayed at Seathwaite for six nights in the end, splashing about in the stream pool in lieu of showers, packing rubbish into the van lockers and ekeing out our food stash. Neither of us are ‘children of the internet’, we’re a tad old for that, but I have to admit I missed not having access to it (for researching sites to stay in, routes to hike etc) or being able to get calls from my dad. It’s given me a bit of a reset though, I’ll be aiming to spend less time refreshing the BBC News website in future!

We’ve decamped now to Kendal where the current mini-heatwave is cooking us and our fellow field-dwellers on another temporary C&CC site. We’re liking these places, far less formal than the club’s permanent sites and about a third the price!

Right, it’s too hot to be sat in here typing any longer, I’m off, take it easy folks, Jay

---

New to motorhome life,
planning your own motorhome adventure or
looking for the perfect gift for the motorhomer in your life?
Check out our OurTour range of books.