Buttermere car park
Buttermere village
This page does not say whether there is space today. It says when the people before you arrived, from the National Park Authority’s own ticket data, and it prints only what a source publishes: no directory price, no guessed operator, no unverified bus time.
At a glance
Where it is
This car park, and the others we hold a page for. Distances between them are not shown: how far another one really is depends on the road, and we only publish that where it has been measured on the ground.
Toilets, cafes, pubs
Toilets on site.
Getting here by bus
- 77 — Buttermere, outside Court Hotel, 166 m from the car park
| Service | Weekday | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|---|
| 77 towards Keswick | 18:20 | 18:20 | 18:20 |
Last departures checked against the timetable by Lee on 12 September 2026. Timetables change; the live pilot at /buses/ has the day’s departures where a service is covered.
Walks from here
- Buttermere lake circuit — 7.4 km, 66 m of ascent, starts 40 m away on foot
- Crummock Water shore circuit — 13.2 km, 191 m of ascent, starts 330 m away on foot
- Great Borne & Starling Dodd — 16.0 km, 1,122 m of ascent, starts 250 m away on foot
- High Snockrigg, Eel Crag & Lad Hows — 15.7 km, 1,446 m of ascent, starts 420 m away on foot, 29 m of it up
- High Stile, Seat via Buttermere — 13.0 km, 881 m of ascent, starts 270 m away on foot
- Scale Fell and Mellbreak — 14.7 km, 572 m of ascent, starts 560 m away on foot, 29 m of it up
- The Buttermere Ridge — 13.4 km, 1,012 m of ascent, starts 510 m away on foot, 29 m of it up
Walks in our route library whose start is within two kilometres of this car park in a straight line, from the same join that gives each route its crowding note. The distance on foot beside each is the walk from here to that start, one way, and it is not included in the route’s own distance and ascent.
When people arrive
36,143 tickets were bought at the machine between August 2024 and March 2026, and 61 RingGo sessions were started between April 2024 and March 2026. Read together, hour by hour, they say when the people before you arrived.
The busiest hour is 10:00. About a sixth of tickets (15%) are bought before 10:00, and the running total passes half in the 11:00 hour. 5% are bought before 09:00, the 8th-largest share of the 19 car parks in the release.
The figures
| Hour | Transactions |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | 1 |
| 01:00 | 2 |
| 02:00 | 0 |
| 03:00 | 2 |
| 04:00 | 11 |
| 05:00 | 26 |
| 06:00 | 143 |
| 07:00 | 341 |
| 08:00 | 1,189 |
| 09:00 | 3,739 |
| 10:00 | 7,401 |
| 11:00 | 7,028 |
| 12:00 | 4,822 |
| 13:00 | 4,310 |
| 14:00 | 3,087 |
| 15:00 | 1,831 |
| 16:00 | 1,048 |
| 17:00 | 622 |
| 18:00 | 391 |
| 19:00 | 142 |
| 20:00 | 51 |
| 21:00 | 10 |
| 22:00 | 4 |
| 23:00 | 3 |
The same curve, in the two months that bracket the year. August 2025: 3,021 transactions, busiest hour 10:00; January 2026: 1,012 transactions, busiest hour 11:00.
Raw data: Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.500. Contains public sector information provided by the Lake District National Park Authority and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The aggregation by hour and by month is ours, not the Authority’s: it declined to produce an hour-of-day report and disclosed the transactions instead. The hourly figures are free to download as open data. Compiled 14 September 2026. A transaction is a paid ticket or a phone session, not a car and not a visitor: permit holders and anyone who did not pay are not in it, and one stay can buy more than one ticket, so it is not a count of cars or people in either direction.
The shape of the year
About 20,600 paid transactions a year, averaged over 2023-24 and 2024-25 — the 9th largest of the 20 car parks in the release. August runs 3.9 times January. The busiest month is August and the quietest is January.
The figures
| Month | Transactions |
|---|---|
| January | 691 |
| February | 1,234 |
| March | 1,710 |
| April | 2,104 |
| May | 2,459 |
| June | 2,251 |
| July | 2,433 |
| August | 2,671 |
| September | 2,194 |
| October | 1,710 |
| November | 1,099 |
| December | 742 |
These yearly figures come from Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.486, which covers 20 car parks. The hourly figures above come from a separate release, Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.500, which covers 19 car parks.
Left out of these yearly figures only: Jan-Mar 2026 is RingGo-only, a payment-channel subset, so it is left out of this monthly series. Hawkshead May 2025, and Cow Bridge before Mar 2024, are unexplained in the source and are excluded from comparisons.
Source: Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.486, paid transactions by car park and month. Received 22 July 2026.
What this page does not say
- Whether the car park has space right now. The data is when tickets were bought, in the past; it cannot say what is happening today.
- A postcode. None is held for any of our parking pins, and none is invented.
- An operator, a price, a capacity or a bus time that a published source does not state. A panel that is missing here is missing because nothing sourced could be put in it.
- The prices. The Authority does not publish them online: its car parks page says the charges are on each car park’s signs (read 25 September 2026). It also advises carrying coins, because some machines cannot take cards without a connection.
- Opening hours, a maximum stay, Blue Badge rules or a height barrier, unless a panel above gives one with its source. We hold none for this car park; the signs at the entrance are the answer.
Every figure on this page is regenerated from the committed data and checked, number by number, against it on every push. Corrections: lee@hikes.guide. See also the parking map and the two kinds of Lake District car park, and how early you need to be, which compares all nineteen hour by hour. What a day’s parking costs in bands, beside the bus fare, is on what each part of a fell day costs.