Patterdale Village Store

There’s a shop that is an important one in the world of Wainwright bagging. It’s not a massively flashy shop, nor is it one that is particularly large in size. But size and image aren’t everything.

Sometimes it’s what you stock that counts.

For a small shop in a tiny village, Patterdale Village Store is certainly well stocked. There’s a wide range of food and drink, local produce and gifts. They’ll even do you a Cumberland Sausage Sandwich, or perhaps you’d like to make use of the tiny post office counter that’s open four days a week. You can even buy a set of Coast to Coast coasters to put your mugs on.

All very important.

But this is a store that also played an important part in history. For in 1955 an author walked into the shop with a book they’d published, and asked the then proprietor if they’d be willing to sell it. The shop’s owner took six copies. Within a week he’d ordered another six.

That book was Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Eastern Fells, and you don’t need a PhD to work out who the author was. But most importantly of all in this tale is that this was the first shop to stock any of Wainwright’s guides. A fact marked in March 2017 in the form of a plaque outside the shop.

In his 1991 book, Alfred Wainwright in the Valley of Lakeland wrote the following about the Patterdale store:

“I have a soft spot for the post office, this being the first shop to sell copies of my first guidebook to the fells: an order for six was repeated within a week, a cause of much inward rejoicing and relief since I had incurred a debt of £900 with a local printer.”

Other stockists followed, and the second impression of the Eastern Fells followed at Easter 1956. The second guide book followed a year later.

Since then, over 2 millions copies of the guides have been sold. And it all started at a small, not particularly flashy shop in the village of Patterdale.