hikes.guideLake District

Coniston Old Station car park

Coniston

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

Run byLake District National Park Authority
What it costsPaid. The prices are on the sign at the machine, not published online
How you paypay and display; coins and cards (LDNPA, checked August 2026)
RingGo zone37306
DirectionsOpen in Google Maps drives to the car park, not to the fell
Find it///caravan.selects.breathing the Authority’s own three-word address
Half the day’s tickets boughtin the 10:00 hour
Busiest hour10:00
Busiest monthAugust
Quietest monthDecember
Buses that stop here505

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.

Getting here by bus

  • 505 — Coniston, outside John Ruskin School, 342 m from the car park

Last bus from Coniston, outside The Ruskin Centre. As timetabled from 27 October to 1 November.

  • Towards Kendal (505): Tuesday to Sunday 20:24.

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.

For your date, the last buses from Coniston, outside The Ruskin Centre, every direction we have checked there:

Walks from here

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

5,450 tickets were bought at the machine between August 2024 and March 2026, and 7,308 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. Nearly a third of tickets (31%) are bought before 10:00, and the running total passes half in the 10:00 hour. 14% are bought before 09:00, the 4th-largest share of the 19 car parks in the release.

00:00: 201:00: 102:00: 403:00: 704:00: 1205:00: 3306:00: 10607:00: 32108:00: 1,25209:00: 2,21310:00: 2,49911:00: 2,06112:00: 1,56613:00: 1,01014:00: 71815:00: 41316:00: 24217:00: 13518:00: 8119:00: 3420:00: 2321:00: 1322:00: 423:00: 800:0006:0012:0018:0023:00
Transactions by hour of the day, every month in the release combined. The tallest bar is the 10:00 hour, which is also where the running total passes half.
The figures
Transactions by hour of the day
HourTransactions
00:002
01:001
02:004
03:007
04:0012
05:0033
06:00106
07:00321
08:001,252
09:002,213
10:002,499
11:002,061
12:001,566
13:001,010
14:00718
15:00413
16:00242
17:00135
18:0081
19:0034
20:0023
21:0013
22:004
23:008

The same curve, in the two months that bracket the year. August 2025: 1,223 transactions, busiest hour 10:00; January 2025: 347 transactions, busiest hour 09:00.

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 7,520 paid transactions a year, averaged over 2023-24 and 2024-25 — the 13th largest of the 20 car parks in the release. August runs 3.9 times January. The busiest month is August and the quietest is December.

January: 290February: 333March: 550April: 731May: 781June: 854July: 968August: 1,124September: 772October: 520November: 277December: 174JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Paid transactions by month, averaged over the comparable years.
The figures
Paid transactions by month, averaged over the comparable years
MonthTransactions
January290
February333
March550
April731
May781
June854
July968
August1,124
September772
October520
November277
December174

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.