Waterhead car park
Ambleside
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
57,982 tickets were bought at the machine between August 2024 and March 2026 , and 47,446 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 11:00. About a tenth of tickets (8%) are bought before 10:00, and the running total passes half in the 13:00 hour. 2% are bought before 09:00, the 13th-largest share of the 19 car parks in the release.
The same curve, in the two months that bracket the year. August 2025: 10,633 transactions, busiest hour 11:00; January 2026: 1,730 transactions, busiest hour 13:00.
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 62,900 paid transactions a year, averaged over 2023-24 and 2024-25 — the 2nd largest of the 20 car parks in the release. August runs 7.9 times January. The busiest month is August and the quietest is January.
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.
Toilets, cafes, pubs
Toilets on site.
Charging an electric car
Pod Point, 8 sockets, 7 kW, 50p per kWh; live on the operator’s page when checked on 5 August 2026. Pay as you Go via the Pod Point app, plus a valid parking ticket.
Existence, power, price and access are the operator’s published figures; whether a socket is free and working today is something only the operator’s app can tell you. Source: the operator’s own page, via Charge While You Climb.
Getting here by bus
- 505 — Waterhead Inn for Pier (o/s), 60 m from the car park
- 516 — Waterhead Inn for Pier (o/s), 60 m from the car park
- 555 — Waterhead Inn for Pier (o/s), 60 m from the car park
- 599 — Waterhead Inn for Pier (opp), 133 m from the car park
Walks from here
- Ambleside, Todd Crag, Rydal Cave — 10.4 km, 392 m of ascent, starts 1.2 km from the car park
- Ambleside to the Old Post Office Tea Room, Troutbeck (over Wansfell) — 9.9 km, 546 m of ascent, starts 0.5 km from the car park
- Long Hike to Fairfield from Ambleside — 22.4 km, 1,350 m of ascent, starts 0.8 km from the car park
- Loughrigg Terrace & Rydal Water — 10.7 km, 288 m of ascent, starts 1.4 km from the car park
- The Royal Oak Pub Walk (Ambleside) — 5.9 km, 68 m of ascent, starts 1.4 km from the car park
- Sour Howes, Sallows, Yoke, Ill Bell, Froswick and Troutbeck Tongue in the sun! — 27.6 km, 1,395 m of ascent, starts 0.7 km from the car park
- Stock Ghyll Force — 2.0 km, 90 m of ascent, starts 1.1 km from the car park
- Wansfell Pike and Baystones — 11.9 km, 534 m of ascent, starts 0.6 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.