The Butchers Arms has stood in the middle of Crosby Ravensworth since 1773, and by 2011 it had closed and was facing permanent closure. What saved it was over 300 people buying shares in it. The pub is now owned by the community that drinks in it — Lyvennet Community Pub Ltd — and run as a professional gastropub, which is a more organised outcome than most village rescue efforts manage.
The kitchen does steaks, burgers, vegetarian options, and a changing list of chef's specials, all built on Cumbrian ingredients from nearby. The Sunday lunch is the thing people come back for. On the taps you'll usually find beers from Appleby and Bowness Bay, poured to go with whatever the chef is running that week. CAMRA lists it, and it's remembered as one of the better community pub buyouts in Cumbria.
That is more or less the extent of the village's commerce. There are no shops. For anything beyond a pint and a Sunday roast you drive the five miles to Appleby-in-Westmorland, or over to Shap.
The River Lyvennet runs through the village, and the valley it cuts is the reason to be here. It's quiet, sheltered, pastoral country on the eastern edge of the Lake District National Park, the sort of ground that gets walked over rather than driven to. Follow the river for gentle valley walking; climb out of it and you're onto Crosby Ravensworth Fell, open moorland that runs up toward the M6 corridor.
Two miles from the village is Ewe Close, and it's worth the walk. It's a Romano-British settlement on the moor — enclosed stone hut circles with their field systems still legible in the grass, one of a cluster of similar sites at the head of the Lyvennet valley. It's a Scheduled Ancient Monument, occupied from the Iron Age through the Roman period, and the "Wicker Street" Roman road passes close by. People lived up there for centuries and then didn't, and the outlines are still there to read.
St Lawrence's Church is Grade I listed and has a long memory. Its origins are late twelfth to early thirteenth century, a cruciform church of some size, though what you see now is largely Victorian — partly rebuilt in 1811 and extensively restored around 1860. The crossing piers and arches still tell you how substantial the medieval building was.
The older thing is in the churchyard. There's a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon cross shaft standing there, one of the earliest Christian monuments in this part of Cumbria. It has outlasted the church beside it by five hundred years and is likely to outlast the next one too.
Getting here takes a car and some intent. There's no railway and no regular bus, only minor roads in from the A6 at Shap or the B6260 from Appleby. That keeps the valley quiet, which is the point.
Come Sunday, the drive back down those minor roads is worth timing so you arrive at the Butchers Arms for lunch. It's the one warm room for miles, and the whole village owns a piece of it.
