The Climbers Bar at the Old Dungeon Ghyll was a shippon — a cattle shed — until 1949. Someone converted it, and it became the most famous climbers' pub in England. The floor is still flagstone, the seating is benches, and there is no music.
The hotel sits at the end of the road. There is no through route out of Great Langdale: the B5343 runs in from Skelwith Bridge, reaches the inn, and stops. Beyond it the valley closes into a wall of fells, which is why people come.
The Old Dungeon Ghyll is around three hundred years old. An 1885 rate book records it as the Middlefell Inn, run by John Bennett, a guide for tourists — the job existed then too. It was a hotel and farm until the shippon conversion. After the war it became the gathering place for British climbing: every major club held its annual dinner here, and most of the 1953 Everest team stayed at some point. Sir John Hunt, Tom Bourdillon and George Band all drank in the bar.
You can eat well. Fish and chips, pub classics, daily specials, most of it home-made down to the chips, jam and marmalade, with produce sourced within twenty-five miles. Food runs from noon to nine, with a fuller menu in the evening. Dogs are allowed in the Hiker's Bar, and there's a beer garden for the days the weather permits one.
Further down the valley is the New Dungeon Ghyll, a more straightforward walkers' hotel doing bar food and walkers' meals. It is less famous than the ODG and busier with day walkers and families, partly because the classic ascents start from its car park.
That is where you go up. The Langdale Pikes — Harrison Stickle at 736 metres, Pike o' Stickle at 709 — are the most climbed fells in the central Lake District, and they rise straight off the valley floor. Bowfell (902m) stands at the head of the valley, and Crinkle Crags run along the ridge to the southwest, one of the classic Lakeland traverses. For something shorter there's the direct pull up Stickle Ghyll to Stickle Tarn, past the waterfall — steep, popular, and over before lunch.
The tarn has a small Victorian dam. It was raised to supply water not to a town but to the Elterwater Gunpowder Works.
Pike o' Stickle has an older industry still. Four to five thousand years ago it held one of the most important Neolithic axe factories in Britain. Axes cut from the hard volcanic tuff up there have been found across Britain and Ireland — a stone-age export trade running off the top of a Cumbrian fell.
There is no church in the valley and no shop. The nearest of either is at Chapel Stile, or Ambleside further out. There is no railway either. In season the 516 Langdale Rambler runs up from Ambleside to the ODG car park; otherwise it's the A593 as far as Skelwith Bridge, then the B5343, and then the road runs out.
Whatever you go up, you come back down to the same room: flagstone floor, benches, no music, a dog at your feet in the Hiker's Bar and chips that were made on the premises. The road ended here a long time before you did.
