Every 1st of August, the town crier stands in the market square at Broughton-in-Furness and reads out an Elizabethan charter granting the right to hold fairs. He has done it, or someone has, for hundreds of years. The square he stands in was laid out in 1760 by John Gilpin Sawrey, Lord of the Manor, who modelled it on the elegant squares of London. In the middle is an obelisk, put up in 1810 to mark the jubilee of King George III.
This is a small market town at the southern end of the Duddon Valley, on the western edge of the Lake District. The Georgian square is the centre of it, and the independent shops arrange themselves on and around it.
Two pubs face the square. The Manor Arms is a traditional Furness pub, and a good one — Furness CAMRA named it their Pub of the Year. It looks out at the obelisk.
The Black Cock Inn is the older of the two, a 17th-century Lakeland inn that has stood at the heart of the square longer than the square has been Georgian. It closed in early 2023 when the Lakeland Inns Group went into liquidation, and it has had a complicated few years since. A local company, CGP, bought it and is refurbishing it as a traditional real-ale pub under a tenant landlord — simple food and B&B rather than restaurant catering. A previous incarnation was run by a head chef who had cooked in Norwegian ski-resort kitchens, which is a long way from a Furness market square.
The walking from here is the reason most people come. The River Duddon rises in the high fells near Wrynose Pass and runs south through one of the least-visited valleys in the Lake District, and Broughton sits at the bottom of it. Wordsworth wrote 35 sonnets about the Duddon in 1820; they are among his most admired work. The Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson wrote about the same country.
Southwest of the town is Black Combe, an isolated 600-metre fell that stands apart from the rest. On a clear day you can see the Isle of Man, Wales, Scotland and the Irish coast from the top. Wordsworth described "the unobstructed range of many a league" from its summit, which is the sort of thing you can only really say about a hill that stands on its own. Closer in, Dunnerdale Forest gives you woodland walking along the valley floor.
Getting here is easier than the western Lake District usually allows. Foxfield station, on the Cumbrian Coast Line, is a mile and a half away — one of the few villages out this way with a railway at all. By car it's the A595 from Ulverston or Millom, or the A593 if you're coming down from Coniston.
St Mary Magdalene's is the oldest religious foundation in the town, Saxon in origin, largely rebuilt in 1873 by Paley and Austin of Lancaster. The Domesday Book records Broughton among the townships of the Manor of Hougun, held by Earl Tostig — brother of King Harold, killed at Stamford Bridge in 1066.
The charter still gets read out every August, to a square that has changed less than most.
