The King George IV Inn keeps up to ten real ales on at once, none of them regular. They rotate daily, often from West Cumbrian breweries, and there is no permanent line — you drink whatever turned up that week. It's a slate-and-wooden-floored coaching inn in the heart of the Eskdale valley, CAMRA listed, with a separate restaurant and a specials board that runs to more unusual things than the usual. The steak and ale pie, the Cumberland sausage with Yorkshire pudding, the fish and chips and the scampi are all there if you want them plain.
You can reach it by train, which is not something you can say about most valley pubs. The Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway — La'al Ratty, Cumbrian dialect for "Little Railway" — runs 15-inch narrow-gauge track seven miles from the coast to Dalegarth, and all five of the valley's real ale pubs sit within reach of its stops. It was built in 1875 to carry ore, converted to narrow gauge in 1915, and is now one of the oldest and smallest public railways in the world. It is also the main way visitors without a car get here.
The other option by road is Hardknott Pass from Ambleside, single-track and steep, with a gradient touching one in three. Most people come the gentler way, from the coast via Holmrook on the A595. The nearest mainline station is Ravenglass, on the Cumbrian Coast Line, where La'al Ratty begins.
The valley's second pub is the Bower House Inn, which dates to 1751 and has kept its original features. It is under the same ownership as the King George IV, does traditional pub food with locally sourced Cumbrian produce, and is CAMRA listed too. Between the two of them the valley is better supplied with real ale than its population would suggest.
For everything else there is Eskdale Stores, the village shop and post office, and more or less the main community amenity in the valley.
The walking is the reason most people book. Harter Fell, 649 metres, is a rugged climb with views across to the Scafells and down into the Duddon Valley. For something remoter, the path over the fell to Burnmoor Tarn takes you to a large, lonely upland tarn ringed by stone circles, and carries on to Wasdale Head if you keep going. If you want flat, the valley floor follows the River Esk through woodland and meadow with La'al Ratty running alongside. And the longest, most rewarding route up Scafell Pike — England's highest mountain — starts from the valley head at Brotherkeld.
The church is St Bega's, a Victorian rebuilding of an earlier chapel, serving a settlement scattered thinly across the valley floor.
This is the western Lake District, the quiet side. The Esk runs the length of the valley, enclosed by Harter Fell and the fells climbing toward Scafell, and the whole place is lightly visited compared with the central lakes. You come for the fells and the little train, and the fact that so few other people have bothered.
