J.B. Banks & Son has been selling ironmongery from the same shop in Market Place since 1836. Nails and small items are still dispensed from the original 172 drawers behind a 22-foot mahogany counter, and upstairs there is a free museum: the tin smithy and plumber's workshop of 1829, hand tools, anvils, antique locks and keys, old school photographs, and a 1939 Atco trainer car. The deeds carry the signature of John Wordsworth, land agent to Lord Lowther and father of William. The first John Banks publicly proposed the controls on gun ownership that fed into the introduction of the gun licence. The shop is still family-run, and you can still buy six screws there.
It is a fair introduction to Cockermouth, a market town at the meeting of the Cocker and the Derwent, just outside the National Park's north-western edge. The ruined castle stands above the rivers. Main Street is broad and tree-lined, and halfway along it is a white Sicilian marble statue of the Earl of Mayo — the town's MP for ten years, then Viceroy of India, where he was assassinated in 1872, the only Viceroy ever murdered in office. The 800-guinea cost was raised by public subscription. In 1964 the statue was hit by an oil tanker, pieced back together, and put back up. Cockermouth has the highest proportion of listed buildings per head in Cumbria — 105 of them, six at Grade I — and in 1965 the Council for British Archaeology named it one of only 51 "Gem Towns" in Britain.
The story the town tells first, though, is about beer. Jennings had brewed at the Castle Brewery on the riverbank since 1874, until Carlsberg closed it in November 2022 and ended a century and a half of brewing in Cockermouth. In 2025 a local couple, Kurt and Rebecca Canfield, bought it back, hired Chris France — founder of Beer Hawk — as managing director, and brought in Buster Grant, formerly of Bateman's and a past chairman of SIBA, as head brewer. Grant upgraded the ingredients to Maris Otter barley and traditional Fuggles and Goldings hops. The core range returned — Cocker Hoop, Castle Bitter, Cumberland Ale, Sneck Lifter — alongside a new ale called Back Yam, which is Cumbrian dialect for "back home". Within weeks of the July 2025 relaunch the brewery was reportedly running out of beer. There is a taproom in the former Old Cooperage with a riverside terrace, open seven days a week in summer, and tours run at £9.50 a head including three half-pint tasters at the end.
The pubs kept the faith in the meantime. The Bitter End on Kirkgate is the town's only brew-pub — it opened in 1995 in a previously abandoned building, and its original one-barrel brewery was at the time one of only two microbreweries in the whole of Cumbria. The current landlords, Mark and Jackie Cockbain, who also run the Wheatsheaf in Lorton, restarted brewing at the back of the pub in October 2025 with three 500-litre fermenters. It is a free house with bottled beers from around the world, locally sourced meat including steaks and rack of lamb, food until 8.30pm, a free quiz every Tuesday at 9pm, and dogs welcome.
The Swan Inn, in the Georgian Kirkgate quarter, is one of the town's oldest drinking places — flagged floors, low beams, a real fire, at least half a dozen handpulls, and the sports television usually on with the sound off. It is the headquarters of the Cockermouth Mechanics Band, the town's brass band, fields two quiz teams, and was registered as an Asset of Community Value in 2016. It has deliberately resisted becoming a food pub. The Bush on Main Street has had a brew house on the site for around 300 years; its first registered landlord was William Proctor in 1811, horses were once led through the arch beside it to the yard behind, and staff have reported hearing phantom hooves. Dogs are welcome in all areas and water is provided. The Castle Bar in Market Place, run by Sean and Jayne, is an 18th-century front on a building that is partly 16th-century or earlier — probably a merchant's house, later the Ship Hotel — with a CAMRA national design award and a terraced beer garden behind. The Fletcher Christian on Main Street, named for the Bounty mutineer born nearby, is the big-screen sports bar, with nine or ten televisions, Monday bingo, live music every Saturday, and what is widely cited as the best-value pint in town — one reviewer clocked John Smith's at £1.90. And at 1761, a small cocktail bar in the former Sun Inn, renovation exposed medieval stonework inside the Georgian shell; there is an open fire in winter.
The eating has quietly caught up with the drinking. 41 Market Place, opened in late 2023, is a 24-seat restaurant run by Derek Boardman, a chef from Workington, and Nicola Beetson, from Australia — they met working at a Buttermere hotel where he was head chef and she was manager. The menu is modern European, seafood plates and fresh pastas and hearty meats, and changes with the seasons; dinner runs Friday to Tuesday, plus Sunday lunch. Aspava is a family-run Turkish restaurant hidden in Headford Court, a courtyard off Main Street — through the large white gates next to the toy shop. Mehmet and Tracy, who ran a Turkish takeaway in Cleator Moor for years, cook the food of Gaziantep in south-east Turkey, meze and grills, with a patisserie next door for baklava. Tarantella on Main Street has been doing Italian for years, with Italian beer on tap. And the Trout Hotel on Crown Street — built in 1670 as a private house called Sandclose, a hotel since 1934, named for the trout fishing on the Derwent behind it — does tapas and small plates on a heated riverside terrace. Bing Crosby stayed there in the summer of 1966, filming a fishing programme; locals stood in the rain all week waiting for him to catch a salmon. He landed several trout and left for the races at Doncaster.
For daytime, Fika on Station Street is a Swedish-themed coffee shop run by Harry Machin and Rachel Dunbar — he ran a hog-roast stall on Keswick Market and worked in two-rosette kitchens, she worked the same café's front of house as a teenager before training as a solicitor, and the place was their regular breakfast spot before they bought it. They brought back the indoor tree it was known for, and run fine-dining evenings on Fridays and Saturdays. The Coffee Kitchen in Market Place has baked real bread since 2011 — flour, yeast, water and salt, nothing else — with loaves running from Farmhouse White through Honey and Sunflower and Pane Rustica to Beacon Brown. Tony Harrison the butcher on Main Street makes his own pies and supplies the local hotels and pubs. Shill's on South Street is a deli downstairs — artisan cheese, chocolate, a serious wine selection — and a bistro upstairs that turns to tapas in the evening. Choc of the North is run by Clare Doherty, who taught secondary-school English for 27 years before switching to chocolate. There is a farmers' market on the first Saturday of the month, a Friday-morning market of cakes and produce in the United Reformed Church, and Hollie & Belle the florist on Station Street sells bunches of "kitchen flowers" for £5.
The walking starts from the front door. The Two Rivers walk is a four-mile, two-hour circuit from the Memorial Gardens car park that takes in the brewery, the castle, a stretch of disused railway, Harris Park and Wordsworth House — flat enough for anyone, in any weather. The Greenway follows the old railway line through woodland to Harris Park, given to the town in 1895 by Mrs Harris in memory of her husband Joseph, whose linen mill once employed 800 people and wove fabric for aircraft wings in the First World War. Slate Fell, a mile out, is the locals' dog-walking leg-stretch. Watch Hill and Setmurthy Common, north-east of town, are both listed in Wainwright's Outlying Fells — so a family can bag a Wainwright without leaving the town's footpaths, with views to the Solway coast and, on clear days, the Galloway hills. A short drive down the Vale of Lorton brings you to Low Fell and Fellbarrow above Loweswater; Wainwright called the view from Low Fell over Crummock Water "a perfectly composed view of mountain and lake scenery. A connoisseur's piece". Buttermere, Crummock Water and Loweswater all lie within eleven miles, and the Buttermere lake circuit — four and a half miles, mostly level — is an official accessible route, manageable with a sturdy pushchair. Whinlatter Forest, ten minutes up the pass, has a Gruffalo trail, Go Ape, and 36 kilometres of purpose-built mountain-bike trails, the longest in the Lake District.
Wordsworth was born here on 7 April 1770, in the nine-bay Georgian house on Main Street that the National Trust has run since 1938. It is presented as the family home of the 1770s rather than a shrine — a working Georgian kitchen with real food and tasters, costumed servants, a children's bedroom full of toys and dressing-up clothes, ghost stories in the cellar, and the terrace walk above the Derwent where the young Wordsworths played. In the flood of November 2009 the house survived by about two inches; the walled garden was torn apart and has been rebuilt twice, after 2009 and again after Storm Desmond in 2015. Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, was born at Eaglesfield just outside town and attended the same free grammar school as Wordsworth, nine years ahead of him. So did Fearon Fallows, a weaver's son who became His Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope. That is a lot of output for one small school beside the churchyard.
The castle was first built in 1134, partly with stone robbed from the Roman town across the river at Papcastle; it is still owned by the Egremont family and not generally open. When Mary, Queen of Scots fled into England in May 1568 she lodged in the town, at the Fletcher family's Old Hall off Kirkgate — the merchant Henry Fletcher gave the destitute queen a gown of crimson velvet, and she sent a letter of thanks. Cockermouth has no Domesday entry, and the reason is the good story: in 1086 this was Scotland, and William's surveyors never came. The town's birth certificate is instead its market charter of 1221, which first set the market on Saturday and then, by a revised charter six months later, moved it to Monday.
The floods of 2009 and 2015 both put Main Street under water — in 2009 it ran eight feet deep, and over 200 people were rescued, around 50 of them winched out by RAF helicopters. The town's answer was Taste Cumbria, a food festival founded in 2010 to show Cockermouth was open for business; it is now the county's biggest, with around 90 producers filling Main Street each September. There is no railway — the station closed in 1966 and the site is now the fire station and mountain rescue base — but the X4/X5 bus runs roughly hourly between Workington, Keswick and Penrith, and the A66 puts you in Keswick in about half an hour.
The New Bookshop on Main Street has a café that hosts book groups and author evenings, and the council has approved knocking through two upper floors because it keeps running out of room. It was recently taken over by Louise Heaton, a Cockermouth resident of twenty years. Its long-serving bookseller, Clare Mulligan, was still on the staff at eighty.
