The Romans left. The Norse stayed. By 1650 Ambleside had been granted a charter to hold a market, and during the reign of James II a further charter let it collect tolls. The Market Place became the local hub for the wool trade and the area's farms. A packhorse trail to Grasmere was the main route between the two towns until the turnpike was completed in 1770. At the foot of that trail, Smithy Brow earned its name: this is where pack ponies were re-shod after the climb. When stagecoaches replaced packhorses, Ambleside became a regular stop between Kendal and Keswick - a town shaped by everything that needed to pass through it.

The Kendal and Windermere Railway opened in 1847 and changed the Lake District forever. Tourists arrived in numbers that overwhelmed the old chapel of St Anne, and so in the 1850s George Gilbert Scott - one of the great Victorian Gothic Revival architects - was commissioned to design St Mary's Church. Its stone spire is unusual in Westmorland churches. William Wordsworth had been working in Ambleside since 1813 as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, walking down each working day from Rydal Mount. The position drew him a steady income beyond poetry - so steady that Shelley wrote a mild sonnet of reproach, To Wordsworth. Wordsworth held the office until 1842, when he resigned on becoming Poet Laureate. His old stamp office is still in the centre of town.

Other lives intersected Ambleside in stranger ways. The German artist Kurt Schwitters - one of the great figures of European modernism - spent his final years here, dying in January 1948. He had fled Nazi Germany for Norway, only to be overtaken when Germany invaded Norway in 1940; he escaped on to Britain, where the wartime authorities, fearing he might be a German sympathiser, interned him on the Isle of Man for fourteen months. Schwitters was released after Alexander Dorner of the Rhode Island School of Design sponsored him, and he made his way to the Lake District. He spent his last years working in a barn near Ambleside, building what he called his final Merzbarn out of pasted scraps. He had escaped one country, been imprisoned by another, and found refuge under English fells.

Today Ambleside is a base camp. Specialist shops along the main street sell boots, ropes, maps, and guidebooks. The Fairfield horseshoe ridge walk - one of the great Lakeland circuits - begins here. Ten pubs or bars cluster within a quarter-mile of the centre, serving the local population, the tourists, and the students of the University of Cumbria's Ambleside campus, which trains people in Conservation, Forestry, and Outdoor Studies. Two Michelin-starred restaurants, Lake Road Kitchen and The Old Stamp House, operate within yards of the church. From Ambleside Pier at Waterhead, year-round Windermere Lake Cruises 'steamers' (now diesel-driven) run south to Bowness and Lakeside. Between March and October a second service heads across to Brockhole, the Lake District Visitor Centre, and on to Wray Castle.

The town maintains the Langdale and Ambleside Mountain Rescue Team, one of the busiest volunteer mountain rescue teams in the country. They are called out by the same fells that bring people here: Wansfell, Loughrigg, the Langdale Pikes a few miles up the road. Ambleside's climate is oceanic and, by Lake District standards, very wet. The town has flooded repeatedly. In December 2015, Storm Desmond pushed the River Rothay over its banks and through the streets. The waters drained, the shops reopened, and the buses started running again to Coniston, Grasmere, Keswick, and Lancaster. The fells, as always, were unmoved.