Brigsteer clings to the limestone cliff below Burnbarrow Scar, which means the village is built at an angle. The houses step down the scarp, and below them the ground drops away into the Lyth Valley, a flat green floor covered in damson orchards. You are looking down on it from a ledge.
The pub is the Wheatsheaf Inn, and parts of it date to 1762. It's a traditional Lakeland inn, CAMRA listed, now run under Robinson's Individual Inns Group, and it keeps its log fires and cosy corners. There's a conservatory extension for when the corners fill up. The kitchen does modern British cooking with the seasons — beef brisket, fish and chips, fish pie, sticky toffee pudding, and a bread pudding served with biscuits. Food comes out in the bar, the conservatory, and the main dining room, so wherever you sit you can eat.
It was named Cumbria Life Pub of the Year in 2015 and a finalist several years after, and it pours three changing beers alongside one regular. Walkers coming off Scout Scar and the Lyth Valley tend to end up here, which is the natural order of things.
Scout Scar is the walk. The limestone escarpment above the village is one of the classic short outings in the area, an hour on foot from the pub door, and it opens out onto the Lyth Valley, Morecambe Bay and the Lakeland fells all at once. At the southern summit there's a domed stone shelter with a toposcope on top, known locally as The Mushroom. It tells you what you're looking at, which on a clear day is a great deal.
A mile south is Sizergh Castle, and it's worth the mile. The Strickland family have held it for more than seven hundred years, staying Catholic straight through the Reformation, before it passed to the National Trust in 1950. The pele tower is 14th-century and one of the largest in England; inside there's Elizabethan oak panelling and formal gardens with a rock garden. From the Wheatsheaf it's an hour's walk across the estate.
Down on the valley floor are the damson orchards. In April the whole of the Lyth Valley turns white with blossom, marked by a Damson Day festival. Two more valley pubs sit within reach — the Punch Bowl Inn at Crosthwaite and the Black Labrador at Underbarrow — if you want to make a circuit of it.
There is no church in Brigsteer and no shop. The nearest of everything is Kendal, five miles northeast. There's no railway and no regular bus either, so you arrive by car — the minor road from Kendal via Helsington, or up from the A590 past Sizergh.
The village is first recorded between 1227 and 1237. The name comes from the Old English brycg, a bridge, and steor, a young bullock — a bridge where the young cattle crossed. Eight centuries on, the cattle are gone and the bridge is still doing the same job it was named for.
