Drink it in!
Incredible walk: tick. Multiple fantastic pubs: tick. Warm welcomes, warm fires, fascinating stories: tick. Welcome to Great Langdale, scene of Country Walking’s favourite pub walk in the world.
Incredible walk: tick. Multiple fantastic pubs: tick. Warm welcomes, warm fires...
PUTTING TOGETHER A really good pub walk is trickier than you might think.
For a start, different people have different ideas about what makes a good pub walk. Ask my father-in-law and it must involve virtually nothing in the way of “ups” and a pub-to-miles ratio that very much favours the pubs rather than the miles. And that’s fair enough; you might well agree with him. Let’s call you guys the Short Hops. For others, there should be a pub halfway round and another at the end, and as long as what happens in between looks nice and gets the blood flowing, great. You’re the Middle-Enders.
And others want to feel like they have really earned their pint. For them, the ideal pub walk is the entire first half of the Pennine Way, leading to that tortuous, terrible, wonderful mile as they cross the boggy moors towards the ever-distant Tan Hill Inn. And the drinking of the resulting drink – whatever it might be – should call to mind that moment in Ice Cold in Alex when John Mills chugs down the most eagerly-awaited pint of beer in the history of hostelry. You guys are the Pleasure Delayers.
So we thought about it very carefully. Then we came here.
This place, you see, has options that will suit all of our categories (and probably others too).
It has a mountain ( but you can edit it out). It has five pubs that regularly make it into the Good Pub Guide ( plus a café, if pubs aren’t your thing). It has some of the most spectacular scenery in Britain. It has a river, a village green and a lake (well, a tarn – one of the most beautiful tarns in the Lake District, in fact). It has long flat bits and short, sharp climbs. And it all happens in a place that actually has the word ‘ale’ in its name.
Welcome to Great Langdale. Dale by name, ale by nature.
There are five wonderful pubs in Great Langdale: the Britannia Inn at Elterwater, the Wainwrights’ Inn at Chapel Stile, and three at the far end of the valley: Sticklebarn, the New Dungeon Ghyll, and at the very end of all things, the Old Dungeon Ghyll. Take a look at the map and you’ll see them laid out on the route of our walk. If you’re a Short Hop, you can take the 516 Langdale Rambler Bus from Old Dungeon Ghyll to Elterwater, hop off, start at the Britannia and walk back along the valley floor, passing the other three as you go. It’s 4 ½ miles with five pubs and it’s mostly flat. That’s my father-in-law sorted.
If you’re a Middle-Ender or a Pleasure Delayer, though, you can do the whole shebang, climbing the big, knobbly flanks of Lingmoor Fell for some of the best views in the Lake District, before descending to Elterwater for that first ale
of the day (which you’ll only get after 4 ¾ miles – that’s an ale well earned), then deciding exactly how many of the following three you want to visit before ending up back at the ODG.
You could even split it over two short winter days if you like, staying at one of the pubs en route, because they’ve all got rooms close by. The self-tailoring pub walk, if you will.
And even if you do it all in one go, there’s no need for the usual pub-walk worries of choosing a designated driver or spending a fortune on taxis. You can either use the Rambler bus to get you back to Ambleside (or Kendal) – or, even simpler, just park at the Old Dungeon Ghyll and stay the night there afterwards. On the right night, with the right shaggy-haired, slightly bedraggled clientele, that’s an evening you’ll remember for a long time. So that’s the logistics. What of the details? Well, Great Langdale (meaning ‘ long dale’) is surely one of the most scenic corridors in the whole of Lakeland – and it’s as gorgeous in winter as it is in the full flush of summer. Lower down, Great Langdale Beck ( later the River Brathay) surges through cute mini-canyons lined by frostflecked oak and beech. Higher up, the Langdale Pikes – the Beatles of the Lake District – play their
rock ’n’ rollicking act on the grandest stage imaginable, with the even bigger Bowfell and Crinkle Crags lurking in the background. Our route doesn’t climb them – this is winter, and they’re a big undertaking in winter; certainly too big for a pub walk. But it does gawp at them. A lot.
Lingmoor, by contrast, is the perfect walkers’ winter mountain. At 1539ft it’s no slouch, but it’s not so high that you have to bring an ice axe, nor so rocky either. Its name refers to ling heather, and the name sets out Lingmoor’s gentle scene nicely. It’s steep in places, with a few dodgy drops into long-abandoned slate quarries, but mostly it’s just a bundle of knolls and knobbles – which just happen to offer some of the finest views in the kingdom. Stuck like a chockstone between Great and Little Langdale, it makes you feel like you’re at the centrepoint of a whole universe of stunning mountains. And there’s still room to sit down with a flask of coffee.
Oh, and Blea Tarn. Exquisite Blea Tarn, beloved of photographers since photography began. Sitting in its own little hause in the mountains, it frames up one of the must-see views in all of Cumbria: that incredible sight-line northwards across the tarn, past the jagged little thrill of Side Pike, to the Langdales hulking beyond, cradled perfectly by the curve in Lingmoor’s horizon.
The second half of the walk – the pub walk proper – is all about the Great Langdale valley. A place of bare trees and orange heathland, with big grey crags towering above. Quarries and mines; cottages and waterfalls; shiny copper and green slate. In Neolithic times the valley was a munitions factory: axe-heads were sharpened and refined up on the flanks of Pike o’ Stickle. The theme continued in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was home to a gunpowder plant. Today the National Trust looks after huge swathes of the valley; it owns ten farms, a campsite and the extraordinary Sticklebarn venue too. Langdale is the flagship for the Trust’s attempts to bring balance to beautiful places: balance between leisure and conservation, between human and animal, between playground and livelihood. In this valley, that balance is perhaps more carefully preserved than in any other national park.
And for us, it’s the hospitality that really makes
Great Langdale so perfect. Very few valleys in Lakeland (or anywhere else for that matter) have such a concentration of acclaimed places to relax, drink a beer or enjoy a meal. Borrowdale has good contenders but they are spread out too thinly for easy connection; Buttermere has the Fish and the Bridge but they are right next to each other. Wasdale has just one place to go, and everyone wants to go there. But in Great Langdale, you get the full spectrum from homely, flagstone-floored simplicity (the ODG) to Grand Designs luxury (the Langdale Hotel, parent of the Wainwrights’ Inn) – and all spread pretty evenly throughout the valley. Basically, Langdale rocks; and when you pitch up at the Old Dungeon Ghyll at the end of this fantabulous day, you’ll understand why. Whatever you may be – Short Hop, Middle-Ender, Pleasure Delayer – this place has a walk that’s perfectly in tune with your preferences. You might even meet each other and talk along the way.
So that’s why we chose this as our centrepiece. There are other crackers, of course – and this issue is full of them. Pub walks on the coast, in the lowlands, in forests. But the great thing with all the ones we’ve chosen is that they all present you with a great walk and (unless they change hands disastrously) a great pub. Sometimes it’s all too easy to find a great pub with a rubbish walk, or vice versa. Not here. A new landlord would have to try really, really hard to get one of these pubs wrong. And as far as we know, Great Langdale isn’t planning to change its scenery anytime soon. And that’s why this is the greatest pub walk in the world.
Probably.