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The Lake District by month

What each month is usually like on the fells — how many dry days it averages, how many of those are sunny, four walks chosen for the light available, and how busy the car parks get. Climatology, not a forecast.

• This monthJanuary12.3 dry days · 7.1 sunny
• This monthFebruary10.5 dry days · 8.6 sunny
• This monthMarch13.7 dry days · 12.5 sunny
• This monthApril16.7 dry days · 16.0 sunny
• This monthMay16.1 dry days · 15.9 sunny
• This monthJune11.8 dry days · 11.6 sunny
• This monthJuly11.2 dry days · 10.8 sunny
• This monthAugust10.5 dry days · 10.2 sunny
• This monthSeptember11.5 dry days · 10.5 sunny
• This monthOctober11.7 dry days · 9.5 sunny
• This monthNovember10.6 dry days · 7.9 sunny
• This monthDecember10.2 dry days · 5.6 sunny

If you only read one of these, read April, Not August — the reason the busiest month is not the best one.

How to read these figures

A dry day is one with under a millimetre of rain. A sunny day is a dry day that also had at least four hours of sunshine — so the sunny count is a subset of the dry one, never an addition to it. Both definitions are the store’s own and are applied identically to every month.

The bar under each month is its dry days measured against the best month of the year, so the shape of the year is legible without reading a digit.

What we don’t claim

• This is climatology, not a forecast. It says what the odds have been, never what next week will do. For that, see conditions.
• One grid point, 11 years. A working baseline, not a 30-year normal, and the Lake District is not one grid square.
• Paid transactions are not visitors. A car park with free parking alongside, or one most people walk to, is undercounted.
• Every parking figure compares a site to itself, never to another site.

By Lee McCoy. Updated 30 August 2026.