Waberthwaite is a small, former rural civil parish (about 4 square miles in area) on the south bank of the estuary of the River Esk, in Cumberland, Cumbria, England.

It is well known for its Cumberland sausages, and lists among its other assets a granite quarry that is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI); the Esk estuary, which forms part of the Drigg Coast Special Area of Conservation (SAC) - a designation for areas of European importance; the 800-year-old St. John's Church,[2] and the remains of two Anglian/Norse crosses of an earlier period.

Linguistic authorities affirm that the name Waberthwaite was originally Old Norse Veiðr buð þveit, meaning hunting or fishing booth clearing.

It changed hands a number of times after that, but at the time of the Norman Conquest (1066) most of modern-day Cumbria was held by the Scottish king Malcolm III, though the southern territories of Furness, Cartmel and the Manor of Hougun (which included Millom and extended as far north as Bootle, Cumbria), were held by the Saxon earl, Tostig Godwinson, and were regarded as part of his Yorkshire lands.

By the time of the compilation of the Domesday Book in 1086, the Normans had not encroached beyond the 1066 boundaries, and Bootle was still the northern limit of their holdings in West Cumberland.

Waberthwaite is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, so it appears that it was the southern limit of land held by King Malcolm III in West Cumberland, though it had been settled by Norsemen by then, or possibly it was a no-man's land remote from proper control by Malcolm III and of no value or interest to the Normans.

It is now an SSSI because its faces and outcrops provide excellent exposure of granodiorite rock, which is an unusual variety of Eskdale granite and is seldom well-exposed[13] The quarrying and agricultural engineering company Ord and Maddison started extracting rock from the quarry in about 1883,[14] but ceased operations in the 1890s because of transport difficulties in getting their product up a steep hill to the main road from where it could be taken by truck and steam engine to Eskmealas railway station.

By 1913 the quarry was well equipped with stone breaking machinery, rotary screens, cubing mill, a steam loco, cranes, compressed air rock drills, and an aerial ropeway that carried the quarry products to a railway siding at Monk Moors.

The new company replaced the aerial ropeway with two Bedford trucks and ran operations on a smaller scale, but it struggled, and despite a slight recovery during the Second World War, the quarry closed in 1946.