Cartmel

Pudding, priory and Michelin stars

The village shop in Cartmel makes over a million sticky toffee puddings a year. Howard and Jean Johns arrived in 1971 to run the Kings Arms, developed the pudding at the pub in 1984, and took over the then-struggling village shop and post office in 1989 — Howard as postmaster, Jean doing the cooking. They started at twenty-five puddings a week. Their son Simon now runs an operation that supplies Booths, Waitrose, Selfridges and Harvey Nichols and ships as far as Dubai and South Korea. In the shop itself an individual pudding is £2.25 and the family size £8.50, and there are sticky ginger, sticky chocolate and sticky banana versions, plus a deli counter of pork pies, quiches and scones. Dogs are allowed in. The coffee is good.

That is the shape of the place. Cartmel has fewer than two thousand people and holds four Michelin stars, the most of any village in Britain. It also brews its own beer, sells its own cheese, and runs England's smallest National Hunt racecourse around the village cricket pitch.

The village sits on its own low limestone peninsula between the southern Lake District fells and the tidal flats of Morecambe Bay, a couple of miles from Grange-over-Sands and technically just outside the national park boundary. The name is Old Norse for "sandbank by rocky ground". The River Eea — the name is an ancient word meaning, simply, water — threads through the middle, and the square keeps its eighteenth-century market cross, its cast-iron pump, and the fish slabs: stone slabs on which fish carried up from the bay were laid out on market days. Over the rooftops rises the tower of Cartmel Priory, its upper stage set at forty-five degrees to its base, which no other church tower in England is. The priory's fourteenth-century gatehouse stands on the square, the only other monastic building to survive; the rest was quarried away into the village's houses, several of which visibly contain dressed priory stone.

The stars first. L'Enclume occupies a former smithy on Cavendish Street dated to 1243 — a blacksmith worked in it as late as 1992 — and a large anvil still stands in the middle of the dining room, the name being French for one. Simon Rogan opened it in 2002, and in 2022 it became the first restaurant outside London and the South East to hold three Michelin stars. The tasting menu is £275; a shorter seasonal lunch runs at £125 from April to October; the wine list has 489 labels and stops at £1,350. The produce arrives daily from Our Farm, Rogan's twelve-acre farm up Aynsome Lane, which delivers young shoots still growing in their trays. Next door, Aulis is a six-seat chef's table in the development kitchen, where new dishes are tested on you at £265 a head. Rogan & Co on Devonshire Square is the neighbourhood restaurant — one star since 2018, head chef Thomas Reeves, and a three-course set lunch at £49 that gets called one of the best-value Michelin meals in the country. Neither Rogan dining room takes dogs, which makes them the only rooms in the village that don't.

Five pubs and a village appetite

Every pub does. There are five, a density inherited from market days and race days.

The Kings Arms on the square has been there over three hundred years, backs onto the River Eea with the priory behind it, and is where the pudding was invented. It is a freehouse pouring Unsworth's Yard ales, and the menu runs from beer-battered fish and chips at £17 — served with both tartare and curry sauce, declining to choose — to a rib eye with beef-dripping chips at £29.

The Cavendish Arms, a coaching inn for over 450 years, still has its mounting block dated 1837 outside the door. Its steak and ale pie, £25, is made with Unsworth's ale brewed two hundred yards away; the menu also finds room for duck and sesame sausage rolls, Korean steak tartare, Herdwick lamb croquettes, and a Cartmel cheese board at £14. Rooms run £75 to £125 with breakfast, and dogs are welcome in the bar — usually the restaurant and rooms too, but ask ahead.

The Royal Oak is the traditional one — open fires, low beams, and a beer garden with a stream running through it and a wishing well. The owners, new since 2021, do classic pub cooking alongside stone-baked pizzas made to order, with vegetables grown in the pub garden. Dogs get water bowls and treats in the bar and garden, though not in the four letting rooms.

From pub doors to the brewery yard

The Pig & Whistle, out on Aynsome Road at the village edge, is the Robinsons house. Simon Rogan held its lease from 2012 to 2015 before deciding a village local didn't fit his business and handing it back. Dean and Steph took over in 2024 and finished an eight-week refurbishment in December 2025: new log burners, racing memorabilia including local jockey Jimmy Moffatt's silks, and a cask ale called Cartmel's Galloper's Gold. There is a secret cocktail menu if you can find it, a community curry club, board-game nights, and a beer garden looking over fields to the priory. Dogs are welcome throughout, and there is a doggie menu.

The Priory Hotel makes five: a bar-hotel on the square with six rooms, a three-course Sunday lunch, and prices reviewers call extremely reasonable. Dogs in the bar only — reviews split between "very dog friendly" and, less generously, dog tolerant.

Unsworth's Yard, off the square opposite the gatehouse, was the Unsworth family's garage and haulage business from 1922 until brothers Peter and David rebuilt it as a slate courtyard with a retractable roof, heaters, and live music at weekends. Their brewery opened in January 2012 and names its beers after village legends: Sir William Marshal's Crusader Gold for the priory's founder, Sir Edgar Harrington's Last Wolf for a story we will get to, Cartmel Thoroughbred for the horses. The tap room is open daily. Cartmel Cheeses, run by Martin Gott with his father-in-law Ian Robinson, stocks up to fifty farmhouse cheeses at a time, gives you a free taste before you buy, and on Friday and Saturday evenings from spring to autumn runs sourdough pizza nights in the courtyard that fill up early. David Unsworth's Drinkshop sells wine and gin with a tiny snug for drinking in. Oscar's — chef Kelly Unsworth, David's wife, with daughter Lydia front of house — does small plates in a 22-cover first-floor room with a view of the priory: salt and pepper halloumi, hash browns with truffle, and a homemade butterscotch vodka. The Mallard Tea Shop bakes everything on the premises; the Victoria sponge and the broccoli and stilton soup are the things people mention. Back on the square, Cartmel Coffee hands out complimentary dog biscuits and will seat unsociable dogs tucked away from the other dogs, a level of canine diplomacy most establishments never attempt.

Races, fell paths and the bay

Then the racecourse. Racing here supposedly began with priory monks racing mules on the sands; documented meetings start in 1856, the year before the railway reached Cark. Nine race days now run between the May and August bank holidays, and despite its size Cartmel often draws the third-highest average jumps attendance in Britain after Aintree and Cheltenham, with holiday crowds over twenty thousand — on those days the lanes gridlock, and the sensible arrive very early or walk in from Cark or Grange. The course has the longest run-in in British racing, four furlongs from the final fence, and a place in criminal history: on Bank Holiday Monday 1974 an Irish syndicate ran the real Gay Future here after training a slower lookalike, switching the horses in an M6 lay-by. They picked Cartmel because it had no telegraph link to off-course bookmakers — the only phone was a single red call box. Gay Future won by fifteen lengths at 10–1. Ladbrokes sent a man on a motorcycle from Manchester with cash to shorten the odds on course; he arrived after the race. The affair became a TV film starring a young Pierce Brosnan. Between meetings the racecourse is simply the village green, crossed by footpaths and used for walking dogs.

The walking starts from the door. Hampsfell, the limestone fell above the village, is one of Wainwright's Outlying Fells at 727 feet — about two hours up and down past Pit Farm, grass giving way to limestone pavement with mountain pansies and harebells in summer. On the summit stands the Hospice, a squat stone tower built by Thomas Remington, the vicar of Cartmel, as a shelter for travellers: stone benches and a fireplace inside, external steps to a rooftop platform with a rotating sighting board for naming the fells, and a Greek inscription over the door that translates as "the rosy-fingered dawn". The view runs across Morecambe Bay to the central fells and, on clear days, the Yorkshire three peaks. Wainwright called it "a hill small and unpretentious yet endowed with an air of freedom and space that will recall happy days on greater heights."

Humphrey Head, the limestone headland jutting into the bay two and a half miles south, is by tradition where the last wolf in England was killed around 1390, cornered on the rocks and finished with pikes — in one telling by John Harrington, whose family tomb is in the priory. The famous guided crossing of Morecambe Bay's sands ends at Kents Bank, three miles away: six to eight miles of open sand behind the King's Guide to the Sands, a royal appointment dating from 1538, currently held by Michael Wilson, a local fisherman and the twenty-sixth guide. Nobody crosses unguided. The tide comes in faster than a galloping horse, and the priory's burial registers record 141 people drowned on the crossing between the late sixteenth century and 1880.

The priory and a living village

The priory itself was founded around 1190 by William Marshal, described in his own time as the greatest knight that ever lived. Legend says the first canons meant to build on a hilltop until a voice told them: not there, but in a valley, between two rivers, where one runs north and the other south. Domesday had already recorded the place as Cherchebi — church village — where "Duuan had 6 carucates to geld", so a church stood here before the Conquest. At the Dissolution the parishioners saved the building by claiming the south aisle had always been their parish church, though the subprior, several canons and ten villagers were hanged in 1537 for resisting. Inside are twenty-five misericords carved in 1440 — a unicorn, a mermaid, an ape, a Green Man with three heads — and a south-west door pocked with musket holes from 1643, when Parliamentarian troops stabled their horses in the nave. It is known, incorrectly, as the Cromwell Door. Cromwell never came.

For families there is a community-run play park with entry by donation at the gate, and All About Alpacas meets on Thursday mornings by the village hall — drop-in sessions are £5, and alpaca picnic walks come with a choice of wine or hot drinks. Holker Hall, seat of the Cavendish family, is a five-minute drive: twenty-five acres of gardens, a deer park with Menil fallow deer, and the Great Holker Lime, planted in the early seventeenth century and now twenty-six feet around. Cartmel never had a railway — Cark & Cartmel station, a mile and a half away, is as close as it got, with roughly hourly trains between Barrow and Lancaster. The 530 bus runs to Grange and Kendal, infrequently. By car it is about ten miles from M6 junction 36.

One last thing, in the priory's north aisle. A wooden shelf there still holds bread. Rowland Briggs of Swallowmire died in November 1703 and left £52 to the churchwardens, the interest to buy loaves for the most indigent housekeepers of the parish every Sunday, for ever, in memory of his mother Anna. Three hundred and twenty years on, the loaves are still put out.