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
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.
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 (outside), 60 m from the car park
- 516 — Waterhead Inn for Pier (outside), 60 m from the car park
- 555 — Waterhead Inn for Pier (outside), 60 m from the car park
- 599 — Waterhead Inn for Pier (opposite), 133 m from the car park
Walks from here
- Ambleside, Todd Crag, Rydal Cave — 10.4 km, 394 m of ascent
- Ambleside to the Old Post Office Tea Room, Troutbeck (over Wansfell) — 9.9 km, 547 m of ascent, starts 1.1 km away on foot, 34 m of it up
- Long Hike to Fairfield from Ambleside — 22.4 km, 1,425 m of ascent, starts 1.4 km away on foot, 54 m of it up
- Loughrigg Terrace & Rydal Water — 10.7 km, 288 m of ascent
- The Royal Oak Pub Walk (Ambleside) — 5.9 km, 68 m of ascent
- Sour Howes, Sallows, Yoke, Ill Bell, Froswick and Troutbeck Tongue in the sun! — 27.6 km, 1,424 m of ascent, starts 1.3 km away on foot, 48 m of it up
- Stock Ghyll Force — 1.9 km, 89 m of ascent, starts 1.9 km away on foot, 78 m of it up
- Wansfell Pike and Baystones — 11.9 km, 560 m of ascent, starts 1.3 km away on foot, 51 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
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 figures
| Hour | Transactions |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | 21 |
| 01:00 | 12 |
| 02:00 | 7 |
| 03:00 | 6 |
| 04:00 | 33 |
| 05:00 | 107 |
| 06:00 | 197 |
| 07:00 | 718 |
| 08:00 | 1,516 |
| 09:00 | 5,378 |
| 10:00 | 12,585 |
| 11:00 | 15,493 |
| 12:00 | 15,246 |
| 13:00 | 14,017 |
| 14:00 | 12,377 |
| 15:00 | 9,807 |
| 16:00 | 7,184 |
| 17:00 | 4,932 |
| 18:00 | 2,979 |
| 19:00 | 1,506 |
| 20:00 | 690 |
| 21:00 | 372 |
| 22:00 | 160 |
| 23:00 | 85 |
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. 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 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.
The figures
| Month | Transactions |
|---|---|
| January | 1,263 |
| February | 2,653 |
| March | 3,959 |
| April | 5,830 |
| May | 7,365 |
| June | 8,267 |
| July | 8,780 |
| August | 10,000 |
| September | 6,952 |
| October | 4,295 |
| November | 2,222 |
| December | 1,566 |
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.