Cranstons has been selling meat on King Street since 1914, and it shows no sign of stopping. The original shop still runs traditional meat and deli counters and sends out hot meat rolls daily. Two minutes from the M6 there's the larger Cumbrian Food Hall — butchery, deli, a fish counter run by Fyne Fish, a hot food counter, and Oswald's café on the first floor, stocking produce from more than a hundred Cumbrian producers. Cumberland sausages and dry-cured bacon are the things to leave with. It took Best Specialist Food Retailer at the 2024 Cumbrian Food Awards.
The town is built of red St Bees sandstone, which gives the whole place a warm colour on a grey day, and grey days are not in short supply here. Penrith sits at the north-eastern edge of the Lake District, in the Eden Valley, roughly six miles from Ullswater and seventeen south of Carlisle. It calls itself the gateway to the Lakes, which is fair enough.
For a pub, Dockray Hall is the one with the deepest history — a 14th-century building said to have housed Richard, Duke of Gloucester before he became Richard III. These days it's known for cask ales, gins and home cooking. The General Wolfe, in the town centre, is a real-ale house with locally brewed beer. Just south-west at Yanwath, the 17th-century Yanwath Gate Inn cooks with local produce and welcomes dogs in the bar.
The George Hotel on Devonshire Street has its own footnote: Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed here on 21 November 1745 as the Jacobite army marched south. The locals were not sympathetic, and took to harassing the retreating Scots with what the records call Sunday hunting.
St Andrew's is the church to see. The medieval tower is thick-walled and defensive — a pele tower in all but name — while the body was rebuilt in 1720 on the model of St Andrew's, Holborn. Pevsner called it "the stateliest church of its time in the county." In the churchyard stands the Giant's Grave, a pair of 10th-century Norse cross shafts flanked by four hogback stones, said to mark boars killed by a king in Inglewood Forest. Inside hang two paintings by the Penrith-born artist Jacob Thompson and a pair of brass chandeliers given in 1745 by the 2nd Duke of Portland.
From the town centre, Fell Lane and a wooded path climb to Beacon Pike, 286 metres up, crowned by a red sandstone beacon tower built in 1719. On a clear day you can see the Pennines, the Lakeland fells, and the Scottish mountains across the Solway Firth. A 3.8-mile loop links the beacon with the castle ruins.
The station is a mile from the centre, directly opposite the castle, on the West Coast Main Line between Euston and Glasgow. The 508 bus runs out to Ullswater, where the Steamers have been cruising the lake since the 1850s.
Penrith does not appear in the Domesday Book. In 1086 the surveyors left it alone, because the area was still reckoned to be part of Scotland, and for centuries afterwards the town sat squarely on the line between the two.
