The Mardale Inn is a whitewashed pub that has been serving Bampton for over 150 years, though for most of that time it went by another name. Locals called it "The Bampton Jerry." Officially it was St Patrick's Well. It closed in 2018, which in a valley this quiet could easily have been the end of it, and then in May 2022 more than 500 people bought it between them. It has been community-owned ever since, and it has made the CAMRA Good Beer Guide every year from 2024 to 2026.
The beer is local — real ales brewed within fifty miles — and the food is the kind you want after a day on the fells: sausage and mash, fish and chips, steak and ale pie, sticky toffee pudding. There are sharing plates and a Sunday roast, and the menu changes with the seasons using ingredients sourced nearby. From the windows you look out over the Bampton valley.
Beyond the inn there is a village shop, combined with the community hub, and after that the village more or less runs out. Bampton is small. The River Lowther meets Haweswater Beck here, and the whole place sits in a quiet, little-visited valley in the eastern Lake District, with the High Fell ridge rising to the south.
That ridge is where the walking is. High Street climbs to 828 metres and follows the line of a Roman road along a broad grassy summit — you reach it from Bampton by way of Wether Hill. The Four Fells Walk is the classic circular from the village, taking in several High Fell tops in one go. Gentler is the approach to Haweswater, two miles south, following the valley down to the reservoir shore.
The shore is where the village's strangest fact lives. Haweswater is four and a half miles long and has supplied Manchester with water since 1935. To make it, the Manchester Corporation bought more than 6,000 acres from Lord Lonsdale in the 1920s and 30s, and between 1937 and 1940 they flooded the valley of Mardale Green — church, hotel, farms and all. The Mardale Inn takes its name from that drowned village. In drought years the water drops and the ruins come back: walls, roads, and the outline of the old hotel, surfacing out of the reservoir before sinking again.
St Patrick's Church has stood on its site for 800 years. It was first mentioned in 1170, when it was attached to Shap Abbey, and it stayed attached until the Dissolution. The present building was largely rebuilt in 1726 and 27, then heavily restored in 1885 with a new oak-arcaded roof and a rebuilt chancel. Inside there are elegant oak pillars.
Getting here takes a car. There is no railway and no regular bus. You come from Shap, five miles north on the A6, down the valley road, or from Penrith by way of Askham. Either way you arrive at a pub that its village refused to let close.
