Cow Bridge car park
Hartsop, Brothers Water
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
When people arrive
4,480 tickets were bought at the machine between August 2024 and March 2026 , and 2,849 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. A third of tickets (33%) are bought before 10:00, and the running total passes half in the 10:00 hour. 16% are bought before 09:00, the 2nd-largest share of the 19 car parks in the release.
The same curve, in the two months that bracket the year. August 2025: 580 transactions, busiest hour 09:00; January 2026: 173 transactions, busiest hour 10:00.
Raw data: Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.500. 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. Compiled 11 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, so every count is a floor.
The shape of the year
About 2,330 paid transactions a year, averaged over 2023-24 and 2024-25 — the 19th largest of the 20 car parks in the release. August runs 3 times January. The busiest month is August and the quietest is December.
Left out of every figure above: Jan-Mar 2026 is RingGo-only, a payment-channel subset. Excluded from every figure. 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.
Getting here by bus
- 508 — Hartsop, opposite Cow Bridge, 51 m from the car park
- 509 — Hartsop, opposite Cow Bridge, 51 m from the car park
| Service | Weekday | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|---|
| 508 towards Penrith | 17:44 | 17:44 | 17:44 |
| 508 towards Windermere | 19:51 | 19:51 | 19:51 |
| 509 towards Hartsop | 15:14 | 15:14 | 15:14 |
| 509 towards Keswick | 15:50 | 15:50 | 15:50 |
Last departures checked against the timetable by Lee on 7 September 2026. Timetables change; the live pilot at /buses/ has the day’s departures where a service is covered.
Walks from here
- Angletarn Pikes and the Martindale round — 22.2 km, 1,349 m of ascent, starts 0.8 km from the car park
- Brock Crags, Angletarn Pikes, Beda Fell & Place Fell — 19.7 km, 1,070 m of ascent, starts 0.8 km from the car park
- Caudale Moor & St Raven's Edge — 13.0 km, 724 m of ascent, starts 0.8 km from the car park
- Finishing of the Far Eastern Fells — 22.5 km, 1,279 m of ascent, starts 0.3 km from the car park
- Hartsop Dodd, Stony Cove Pike, Thornthwaite Crag and Gray Crag — 10.0 km, 832 m of ascent, starts 0.8 km from the car park
- Hartsop Fells and Hart Crag — 11.9 km, 765 m of ascent, starts 0.0 km from the car park
- Middle Dodd Little Hart Crag and High Hartsop Dodd — 10.4 km, 795 m of ascent, starts 0.0 km from the car park
Walks in our route library that start within two kilometres of this car park, from the same join that gives each route its crowding note.
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.
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.