Most people arrive in Cleator on foot, seven miles into a day that started at St Bees. This is the Coast to Coast Walk — Wainwright's 192-mile line from the Irish Sea to Robin Hood's Bay — and Cleator is one of the first villages you reach after the coast lets go of you. By the time you get here the sea is behind and the western fells have started, which is the whole point of the place.
There is a small shop, and for walkers on day one it is a considerable event. You stock up here because the next few miles climb Dent, a short fell that rises just beyond the village, and after that the country opens out toward Ennerdale. The shop is the village's main practical fact.
There is no pub in Cleator itself. For that you carry on two miles east to Ennerdale Bridge, where the Fox and Hounds and the Shepherds Arms both sit, or a mile north to Cleator Moor. It's the kind of arrangement that tells you Cleator is a place you pass through with intent rather than one you settle into for the evening.
The River Ehen runs below the village, and it is worth knowing that this quiet water once did heavy work. Iron smelting began beside the Ehen in the late seventeenth century, and in 1694 the first blast furnace in Cumbria was built here. A steel and bar-iron works and a spade forge followed, closing in 1799. Then the nineteenth century arrived and the ground itself turned out to be full of haematite — mines opened at Todholes, Crossfield, Crowgarth, Jacktrees and Montreal, and Cleator sat at the centre of the iron industry that remade this whole corner of the county. Most of the mines closed in the early twentieth century. The names are still on the map.
St Leonard's Church has outlasted all of it. It was first mentioned in the reign of Henry I, sometime between 1100 and 1135, and the chancel dates from the early twelfth century — around nine hundred years of unbroken worship on one site, which makes it one of the oldest churches in West Cumbria. It was restored in the fifteenth century, then again in 1792, 1841 and 1900, and the nave was rebuilt in 1841–42 by the architect George Webster. The early Norman chancel is still there under the later work.
There is no railway; the nearest station is at Whitehaven on the Cumbrian Coast Line, and you reach the village by the B5295 from Whitehaven or Egremont, with buses running only as far as Cleator Moor. Two miles east lies Ennerdale Water, one of the most remote and quiet lakes in the National Park — the reward, really, for having walked out of the mining towns and into the hills.
