In the churchyard of St Mary's there is a slender column of red sandstone, fourteen feet tall and about eleven hundred years old. It has stood on this spot since somewhere between 920 and 950 AD, which makes most of what surrounds it look recent. This is the Gosforth Cross, the tallest Viking cross in England, ranked second in importance only to the one at Bewcastle. You can walk up and put your hand on it.
The village itself sits on the coastal plain of west Cumbria, three miles from the sea, with the Screes and the Western Fells rising to the east. It is not on the railway — the nearest station is Seascale, two miles west on the Cumbrian Coast Line — and you reach it by the A595 coast road.
The pub to head for is the Gosforth Hall Inn, which was CAMRA's West Cumbria Pub of the Year in 2017 and keeps three or four Cumbrian real ales on at all times. The kitchen does cod and chips, homemade lasagne, steak, and around six different homemade pies, alongside smaller tapas-style plates — salt and pepper squid, lamb koftas, chicken fajitas, sweet chilli prawns. Two bars, open fires going in winter, a Mediterranean-inspired beer garden, and staff who keep dog treats behind the bar. Dogs are welcome in the bar, the lounge, the garden, and in most of the rooms.
The Globe Inn, in the centre of the village, is the other option: a large, unpretentious village pub, CAMRA-listed, serving food and real ales, with rooms if you need them.
From the village you can walk east to Wasdale Head, following the valley road or the path through Nether Wasdale to the head of the dale. In the other direction there are coastal walks toward Ravenglass. A few miles north sits Sellafield, which has been part of the local economy for decades and is a fact of life here rather than a secret.
Back to the cross. The carvings on its shaft show scenes from Norse mythology — Sigyn shielding the bound Loki, Heimdall raising his horn, Víðarr tearing apart the wolf Fenrir, Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent. These sit on the same stone as Christian imagery, the death and rebirth of the world in Ragnarök set beside the Christian apocalypse and resurrection. The people who raised it were converting, and they carved both faiths at once, apparently on purpose. There is nothing else quite like it anywhere.
Inside the church are two hogback tombs, house-shaped Viking-age grave markers, the larger one carved with figures fighting serpents. They turned up during restoration in 1896 to 1897, buried under a twelfth-century wall — someone had deliberately hidden them, probably to keep them safe. There is also the Fishing Stone, a carved fragment showing Thor again, hook and line out for the serpent.
It is a small village doing a very ordinary Cumbrian thing — pub, church, a walk up the dale — while quietly keeping the finest Norse-Christian monument in Europe in its front garden.
