Seen from the road
All three cascades are in full view from the parking area at the top of the pass, no walking required.
Few waterfalls of roughly a hundred metres let you take them in without leaving the car. Moss Force does: it drops in three linked cascades off the shoulder of Robinson directly above the parking area at the top of Newlands Hause, the narrow mountain road that joins the Newlands Valley to Buttermere. There is no gate, no ticket and no closing time, and the whole spectacle is in view from the roadside before you have taken a step. The road is half the pleasure. From Keswick the lane runs out through Portinscale and Stair and up a green valley with barely a building in it beyond the farms, about 13 km and 25 minutes, before the tarmac climbs steeply to the crest at 333 metres. The pass falls away at 1 in 4 on both sides and is single-track in places with passing bays, so anyone uneasy on narrow roads, or driving something large, should take it slowly or reach Buttermere by the Honister Pass road instead. Parking at the top is free and informal — a rough unsurfaced area and the wide verges either side of it — and it fills up on summer weekends. There are no toilets and no café. If you want to get close, a short, steep and entirely informal path climbs beside the beck to the broad pool below the middle cascade in ten to twenty minutes. Sturdy walking shoes are enough, but the rocks beside the water are permanently slick and nothing is fenced, so small children are best kept at the first viewpoint and pushchairs left in the car. Going on up to the foot of the upper fall — the one Coleridge admired in 1802 for the black outcrop that splits its water in two — needs hands as well as feet and is not sensible after rain. One honest caveat: this fall lives on rainfall. In a dry August week it thins to a thread you have to squint for; after two wet days it becomes a white roar whose spray drifts back on to the road. Treat it not as a destination but as a half-hour stop on the way to Buttermere, whose lake and lakeside loop are ten minutes down the far side of the pass.
All three cascades are in full view from the parking area at the top of the pass, no walking required.
One of the finest drives in the northern Lakes, narrow and single-track in places, falling away at 1 in 4 on both sides of the pass.
Ten to twenty minutes of steep, informal path up to the middle cascade's pool, over slick rock and unfenced.
Newlands Hause, Keswick–Buttermere road, Cumbria
Stop if you are passing anyway; the fall is fully visible from beside the car and costs nothing. But do not take a young child up the path, the rocks are slick and nothing is fenced, and pushchairs are useless. In a dry week you may see little more than a thread of water, so do not rearrange plans around it.
Newlands is prettier and shorter from Keswick but it is the narrower of the two, single-track for long stretches with passing bays. Honister via Borrowdale is the busier, better-used route, so you are less likely to feel alone on it — but it is no gentler: both passes climb and drop at 1 in 4. If you are new to driving in Britain or in a large family car, take either slowly and in a low gear on the descent. Both can be closed by snow or ice in winter.