On Fisher Street, behind the Town Hall, ale has reportedly been sold on the site of the Kings Head since the tenth century. The current pub keeps a good range of real ales and serves food from opening until three in the afternoon, Monday to Saturday, and Solway CAMRA named it City Pub of the Year several times between 2008 and 2013. It is not the strangest thing about drinking in Carlisle.
That distinction goes to the fact that, from 1916 to 1973, the pubs here were owned by the government. Munitions workers at nearby Gretna were drinking heavily, so the state nationalised the brewing and selling of alcohol across the city, closed 53 of the 118 pubs, and had an architect called Harry Redfern design model replacements. One survives as the Spinners Arms — built in 1930, Grade II listed, with open fires, tiled fireplaces, wood panelling and decorative guttering. It has been in the Good Beer Guide every year since 2008 and now brews its own ales on the premises.
A few doors from the Kings Head is Cranstons Food Hall, with an award-winning butchery and deli, bread and cakes from Gretna Bakery and Bryson's of Keswick, and Cumbrian wines and ales. For something older, the Market Hall is one of the few Victorian covered markets left in the country, opened in 1889 and still full of small traders.
The cathedral is worth going inside for one thing in particular. Its East Window is the largest in the Flowing Decorated Gothic style in England — 51 feet high, nine lights, tracery drafted from 263 separate points. There are 46 carved choir stalls with misericords from the early fifteenth century. The building is unusually short because during the Civil War the Scottish Presbyterian army pulled down much of the nave and used the stone to reinforce the castle up the road.
That castle is described by English Heritage as "the most besieged place in the British Isles." Mary, Queen of Scots was held here for a few months in 1568; keeping her fed cost Elizabeth I an average of £56 a week in food and wine.
There is also a cursed granite boulder. In 2001 the city inscribed a fourteen-tonne stone with part of a 1,069-word curse laid on the Border Reivers by the Archbishop of Glasgow in 1525, and installed it in the subway between Tullie House and the castle. When a run of misfortunes followed, some locals blamed the stone and campaigned to have it removed. Tullie House itself reopened in 2025; you can fire a Roman weapon, climb a section of Hadrian's Wall, and pull a sword from a stone.
Carlisle sits where the Eden, Caldew and Petteril meet, which is scenic and also why the city floods. A 3.5-mile circular loops from the castle grounds along both banks of the Eden through Bitts Park and Rickerby Park, Victorian parkland with rhododendrons and weeping willows.
The Citadel — twin sandstone rotundas, the old southern gate — stands opposite the station, where West Coast Main Line trains run to London and Glasgow and the Settle line climbs off south from bay platforms 5 and 6. Carr's has been baking biscuits here since 1831. The locals still call it that.
