Qualla: Derwentwater

Derwentwater: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Andy V Byers, CC BY-SA 3.0. Look at any postcard of Derwentwater - taken from Catbells perhaps, or from Friar's Crag on the Keswick shore - and you are looking at one of the most photographed views in England. The Brythonic Celts who named the river that fills it called it the river with oak trees. Five thousand years later, in our age of glossy tourism, location scouts have decided it can be almost any lake, anywhere. The video game Silent Hill 2 used Derwentwater as the eerie panorama at its opening menu. Forza Horizon 4 borrowed it for a racing track. And in 2015, J. J. Abrams chose its wooded shoreline to stand in for the planet Takodana in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The real Derwentwater is more cheerful than any of those cameos suggest.

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Image: User:Andy V Byers | CC BY-SA 3.0

Derwentwater: The Third Lake

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. Derwentwater is the third-largest of the Lake District's lakes by area, after Windermere and Ullswater - 4.6 kilometres long, 1.91 wide at its broadest, covering 5.4 square kilometres. It is fed and drained by the River Derwent, which arrives down the valley of Borrowdale from th...

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Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Derwentwater: Seven Islands and a Hermit

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Seven named islands sit in the lake. Derwent Island, the largest, has the only inhabited house on any island in the Lake District - a curious Italianate villa, built in the late 18th century by a tin-mine speculator named Joseph Pocklington, who used to fire cannons across the wa...

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Image: Public domain

Derwentwater: Vendace and Pigmyweed

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buaidh, CC BY-SA 4.0. Derwentwater used to be one of only four lakes in Britain home to the vendace, a small whitefish that has lived here since the last ice age. For a worried period between 2008 and 2014, conservationists believed it had gone extinct in its native range entirely - the Bassenthwaite ...

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Image: Buaidh | CC BY-SA 4.0

Derwentwater: A Working Lake

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. A passenger launch runs around Derwentwater throughout the year, calling at seven landing stages - Keswick, Portinscale, Hawes End, Low Brandelhow, High Brandelhow, Lodore and Ashness Gate. The full loop takes about an hour. You can buy a single-direction ticket and walk back alo...

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Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

Derwentwater: Names and Stories

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit InterstellarGamer12321, CC BY-SA 4.0. The word Derwent comes from a Brythonic Celtic root meaning oak, the same root that gave England the rivers Derwent, Darwen, Darent and Dart. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the modern name fully settled, the lake was often called Keswick Lake or Keswick Water....

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Image: InterstellarGamer12321 | CC BY-SA 4.0