Every one of the six handpulls at the Old Crown serves beer brewed a few feet away, in a converted barn at the back of the pub. There is no other ale on the bar. If you want something the Hesket Newmarket Brewery doesn't make, you have come to the wrong place.
The pub is the centre of the village, and the village owns it. In 2003 around 150 shareholders each put in £1,500 to buy the freehold, which by most accounts makes the Old Crown the first cooperative pub in the UK. The brewery had gone the same way four years earlier, turned cooperative in 1999 to stop it closing. Jim and Liz Fearnley had started it in that barn in 1988, and it is now the oldest surviving microbrewery in Cumbria.
The ales are named after the fells you can see from the village: Blencathra Bitter, Skiddaw Special Bitter, Catbells Pale Ale, Scafell Blonde.
The food is unfussy — steak and ale pie, lasagne, scampi, a Sunday roast. The kitchen runs Tuesday to Saturday evenings with lunches added on Friday and Saturday, closed Mondays, and it is worth booking ahead. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the rear beer garden. There is a games room with a pool table and darts, plus live music and the occasional charity quiz.
Next door is the brewery's own visitor centre and shop, in case six taps aren't enough and you want to take some home.
Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins walked through in 1857, and Dickens described the Old Crown as a "ridiculous little inn." Behind the market cross there is a house still called Dickens House.
The cross is a clue to what the place used to be. Hesket Newmarket was once a proper market town — the name comes from "Hazel Bush Market" — and the village still arranges itself around the square where the trading happened.
The walking is the other reason to come. The village sits under the Caldbeck Fells, the quieter northern side of the range sometimes called the back of Skiddaw, and it makes a good base for High Pike and Knott. The Cumbria Way, which runs the length of the county, passes straight through.
Getting here takes some doing. There is no railway and no regular bus, so it is minor roads off the B5305 or the lanes through Caldbeck, five miles to the north. Keswick is eight miles away. St John's Church stands in the village.
The beer, though, is the thing. On any given evening the pint in your hand was made in the barn behind you, by a brewery the village bought to keep, in a pub the village bought to keep it open.
