Parking is the hardest part of this walk. The start is the small free parking area at Gutherscale (CA12 5UE, but the postcode covers a wide area, so use the map directions above), with room for only about eight cars. It's usually full before 9AM at weekends and in the school holidays, so get there early or use one of the options below. The lane in is narrow with few passing places, so please don't park on the verges or in passing places; cars that do regularly block farm and emergency vehicles.

The easiest stress-free option in summer is to park in Keswick and take the Keswick Launch across the lake to Hawes End jetty, about 10 minutes away by boat and a short walk from the start. A single is around £6.95 for adults and £3.50 for children, dogs are welcome, and boats run roughly hourly from mid-March to early November, with an early Walkers' Special at 9:45AM. The 77/77A Honister Rambler bus also stops at Hawes End (late March to early November) from Keswick bus station.

The quiet slopes of Catbells hide a busy past. Lead, with a little silver, was mined at Yewthwaite on the western side of the fell and at Brandlehow and Old Brandley on the Derwentwater side, and you can still see the spoil heaps and old levels on the flanks of the fell. Nobody recorded when Brandlehow was first worked, but a Victorian mining writer believed it was older than the use of gunpowder in mining.

Water was the miners' constant enemy. Springs inside Brandlehow poured out about 150 gallons a minute, and its owners tried a 30 foot water wheel and then steam engines to keep the workings dry, ending with a huge 350 horse power beam engine in 1888. In good years the mine raised around 300 tons of ore and employed 70 to 80 men and boys, and the ore held about 9 ounces of silver in every ton. Yewthwaite was abandoned in 1893, and all of the Catbells mines had stopped work by the 1890s.

Mining here was cold, wet and dangerous work. Most of the old shafts have now been blocked off, but please don't go into any of the old workings: they're unstable and dangerous.

On the climb up the north ridge you pass a small memorial plaque set into the rock. It remembers Thomas Arthur Leonard (1864–1948), who founded the Co-operative Holidays Association and the Holiday Fellowship. He wanted working people to be able to enjoy the hills, and his walking holidays gave factory workers something different from the usual week at the seaside. The plaque calls him the Father of the Open-Air Movement in this Country.

Born in London, Leonard became a Congregational minister in Colne. In 1891 he took 32 members of his church on a holiday to Ambleside, and the idea grew from there. He left the Co-operative Holidays Association at the end of 1912 to start the Holiday Fellowship, now HF Holidays. He also helped to set up the Youth Hostels Association and was President of the Ramblers from 1935 to 1946.

A second plaque to him was placed on Cadair Ifan Goch, above the Conwy Valley in North Wales, near where he died in 1948. In 2014, the 150th anniversary of his birth, the broadcaster Paul Heiney filmed a walk up Catbells to remember him.