The Boot & Shoe Inn sits on the green and has been serving in one form or another since 1511, which makes it older than most of the reasons people give for visiting the Lake District. The name comes from a former Duke of Norfolk who lived at Greystoke Castle and wore a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other, the better to ease the gout. Whether that is a story the pub tells about itself or a fact of local record hardly matters after five centuries. It is the name now.
The kitchen changes its menu often and keeps specials going day to day. You can get Cumberland sausage and mash, or a butternut squash tagine if you would rather not, or a doorstop sandwich at lunch, or one of the homemade pizzas, which you can take away. Sunday roast runs 12:30 to 2:30 and again in the evening, with the menu changing week to week. There are real ales and a children's menu. Booking is essential, which for a village pub is either a good sign or an inconvenience, depending on how far you've driven.
There is a shop on the green as well. That is the amenities, more or less, which for a place this size is a fair showing.
The village sits in the Eden Valley, six miles west of Penrith, in the gently rolling country between the town and Ullswater. Around it are Greystoke Forest, a spread of mixed woodland, and the castle park, which runs to three thousand acres. The castle itself is private, but you can see it from the road, and seeing it from the road is most of what anyone does.
A castle has stood on the spot since 1069, when Llyulph de Greystoke put up a timber pele tower. Stone replaced timber, and in 1346 Edward III granted permission to castellate the place properly. The present building went up in the sixteenth century. The barony goes back to a grant from William the Conqueror, and Greystoke turns up in the Norman records accordingly.
St Andrew's Church is Grade I listed and stands on thirteenth-century foundations. In 1382 William, the fourteenth Baron Greystoke, refounded it as a collegiate church, one of the few Cumbria kept. The tower did double duty as a refuge when the Scots came raiding, which they did often enough for a village to build that expectation into its church. Most of the present fabric is sixteenth and seventeenth century, in the Perpendicular style.
The place name means grey tree stump, which is a modest thing to name an estate after. Edgar Rice Burroughs was less modest with it: he made Greystoke the ancestral home of Tarzan, whose formal title is Lord Greystoke. The village has produced one castle, one collegiate church, and one fictional ape-man, and it is the ape-man most people have heard of.
For walking there is the forest, the edge of the castle park, and the Ullswater Way, which you can pick up heading south toward the lake five miles off. There is no railway and no regular bus, so you arrive by car on the B5288 from Penrith, and once you're here the loudest thing is usually the wood.
