Wainwrights' Inn was a farmhouse before it was a pub, and it keeps the farmhouse's low ceiling beams, real log fires and slate floors. The Cumbria Way passes the door. The kitchen belongs to the Langdale Estate, so the estate's own Langdale Smokehouse turns up on the menu — smoked meats and cheeses alongside Cumbrian lamb Henry with mash, mixed veg and gravy, haddock and chips with tartare sauce and mushy peas, and a Cumbrian steak and ale pie with mushrooms, root veg, chips and gravy. Food runs noon to four and five to nine.
Dogs are welcome in the non-carpeted bar areas. The ales come from Barngates, Bowness Bay, Hawkshead, Jennings and Cumbrian Legendary, with guests rotating through.
The pub takes its name from Alfred Wainwright, which in this valley reads less as a tribute than as a job description — the fells he spent his life cataloguing start more or less at the end of the road.
Beyond the inn there's a village shop with Brambles café attached, and above both of them, on every side, the Langdale Pikes. Harrison Stickle reaches 736 metres and Pike o' Stickle 709, and they stand over Chapel Stile the way few fells stand over anywhere. Great Langdale Beck runs along the valley floor, past the village and down toward Elterwater. This is the upper end of Great Langdale, the most dramatic of the Langdale valleys, closed in by crags and scree.
The classic walk climbs the Pikes from the New Dungeon Ghyll car park below the village, one of the most popular fell routes in the Lake District. Halfway up sits Stickle Tarn, a glacial corrie tarn at 470 metres, with the Stickle Ghyll waterfall dropping away beneath it.
The summit of Pike o' Stickle is where the walk turns strange. Around 4,000 BC, people came up here to make axes. The volcanic tuff at the top flaked cleanly into blades, and for a thousand years the site worked as one of the most important Neolithic axe factories in Britain. Axes knapped on that summit have been found across Britain and Ireland. It is a long way to climb to a factory floor.
The valley kept working after that. The Elterwater Gunpowder Works ran from 1824 to 1930 and employed most of the workforce here; the company built the Chapel Stile school in 1824. When the works closed, the Langdale Estate that now owns the inn grew up on its site. The green-grey Langdale slate that roofs the village has been quarried since the mid-nineteenth century, its colour set 450 million years ago in compressed volcanic ash.
Holy Trinity Church sits above the village, below the crags, built in 1857 from that same grey slate. The position does most of the work.
There is no railway. The seasonal 516 bus, the Langdale Rambler, runs up from Ambleside; by car it's the A593 to Skelwith Bridge and then the B5343 into the valley.
By evening the log fires are going, the boots come off, and whoever climbed to a five-thousand-year-old factory floor that morning settles into the non-carpeted bar for the lamb Henry.
