Hartsop is small. Two streets, a footpath up to Hayeswater, a parking area at the village edge for fellwalkers, and a cluster of 17th-century grey-stone cottages crouching together against the wind. Some of these cottages still have spinning galleries - the raised wooden balconies, partly enclosed, where women used to spin wool by daylight, with shelter from the rain. Spinning galleries are a Cumbrian peculiarity, common in the small upland villages of the central Lake District, and Hartsop preserves one of the better surviving collections of them. They are the kind of architectural feature that survives only because no one has had the money or the inclination to tear them down for two and a half centuries.

Across the valley from the village stands Hartsop Hall, in the care of the National Trust. It dates from the 16th century. In its earliest years it was the home of the de Lancaster family, then in the 17th century it passed to Sir John Lowther, ancestor of the family that would later become the Earls of Lonsdale - the same Lowthers whose name appears all over Cumbrian estate records, mineral rights, and shipping concerns. The hall eventually came down in status to an ordinary farmhouse, which is how the National Trust now holds it. It was during one of its 18th-century extensions that the right-of-way story is supposed to have happened. The hall is plain and stoutly built, and looks across at the village it served.

A mile east and several hundred metres up from the village lies Hayeswater, an upland tarn that served as the reservoir for Penrith - twelve miles north - from the late 19th century until 2014, when United Utilities removed the dam and restored it to an open mountain tarn. The walk up to Hayeswater is one of the standard short hikes from Hartsop, climbing the steep bracken-and-grass flanks beneath Brock Crags and Hartsop Dodd. From the tarn it is possible to continue up onto the High Street ridge, which runs north-south along the eastern skyline of the Patterdale valley. The High Street range takes its name from a Roman road - yes, there really was a Roman road along its summit ridge, connecting the Roman forts at Brougham and Ambleside, running open across the fells at over 800 metres. Helvellyn, the higher and busier range, lies to the west of the valley. Hartsop is well-positioned for both.

Like many of the small dales villages, Hartsop was a lead mining community in its working life. Lead ore was found in the surrounding fells, and small workings supplemented the income from farming. The mines are gone, the spoil heaps grassed over, and the village now lives on the very modest tourism that walking-route accommodation provides. There is no shop. No pub. No school. The civil parish of Patterdale, which contains Hartsop, has fewer than five hundred residents in total. The village is officially part of Patterdale for civil administration. In the deeper sense it is itself - a small group of houses on a single lane that climbs into the fells - and it keeps to itself.

Just south of Hartsop the road climbs toward Kirkstone Pass, the highest paved road pass in the Lake District. On the way it passes Brothers Water, a small dark lake that fills the floor of the valley between the village and the pass. Two brothers are said to have drowned there in the 18th century, giving the lake its current name; before that it was called Broad Water. Whether the story of the brothers is true is, as with so many of Hartsop's stories, unverifiable - but the lake is real, dark with peat, and remarkably quiet. From the lay-by above it, on a still summer evening, the only sound you will hear is the wind in the fellside bracken and the occasional bleat of a sheep on Place Fell. Hartsop, less than a mile away, is just behind your right shoulder. You cannot see it. That is, in a way, the point.