Gowbarrow Fell

Aira Force is where most walks up Gowbarrow begin. The National Trust pay and display car park sits where the A5091 meets the A592, below the falls, and the 508 bus between Penrith and Glenridding stops here too. From the car park you climb through the woods beside Aira Beck, with stone bridges and viewpoints over the main fall. The quickest way onto the fell is from Dockray at the top of the beck, about a mile from the summit.

The popular circuit goes up past the falls, follows the beck for a while and then climbs beside a wall onto the open fell. You come back round the south side on the terrace path, which is narrow in places, with steep ground falling to the lake and several flights of steps. On the open top the path is clear, but expect mud, peat among the heather and, in late summer, bracken. There is no scrambling.

Airy Crag

The summit is Airy Crag, a rocky knoll with an Ordnance Survey pillar carrying a National Trust plaque. It sits well back from the shore, so the lake is partly hidden, but you get Blencathra, the Mell Fells and the Helvellyn range. For the view up Ullswater towards Glenridding and Patterdale, go down to Green Hill on the lake side.

The whole fell was once a medieval deer park stocked with several hundred fallow deer. Lyulph's Tower, the castellated house near the falls, was built by a Duke of Norfolk as a hunting lodge, and you pass the ruins of a later shooting lodge on the fell. On 15 April 1802 William and Dorothy Wordsworth walked along the shore below and saw the daffodils in Glencoyne Bay that gave him his best known poem.