The Three Shires Inn sits at the foot of Wrynose Pass, a few hundred metres from Little Langdale Tarn, and it has recently started calling itself Lanty Slee's Langdale. This requires some explanation, and the explanation is the best thing about the village.
Lanty Slee was a farmer here who ran illicit whisky stills through the Langdale valleys for most of the nineteenth century. He sold moonshine at ten shillings a gallon, or loaded it onto pack-horses and carried it over Wrynose and Hardknott to Ravenglass, coming back with smuggled tobacco. The excise officers caught up with him more than once. He was never convicted. He died in 1878 a local legend, and the pub now trades under his name.
The inn was built in 1872 and named, originally, after the Three Shire Stone at the summit of Wrynose Pass, where Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire used to meet before the county boundaries were redrawn in 1974. The stone is still up there — a monolith cut in Cartmel and erected in 1860, now a landmark for everyone who drives the pass.
The kitchen does award-winning home-cooked food and leans on what the valley produces. Locally sourced venison, pheasant and partridge turn up on the dinner menu alongside the classic pub favourites. Lunch is sandwiches, platters and main meals. There's a children's menu with sausage and chips, and a curry. It is popular with walkers, which in this valley means most people.
There are no shops. The nearest are at Ambleside or Coniston, so you bring what you need and the pub takes care of the rest.
The walking is the reason to be here. Blea Tarn sits in a hanging valley between Little and Great Langdale, an easy walk up from the road; Wordsworth put it in "The Prelude." Tilberthwaite Gill is a narrow ravine and waterfall above the village, old copper-mining country, with footpaths that climb on to Coniston Old Man. Little Langdale Tarn gives you flat lakeside walking through meadow and woodland when the fells feel like too much. And Wrynose Pass itself climbs to the Three Shire Stone at 393 metres, then Hardknott carries on to Eskdale.
Those two passes are the only way through the valley head, and the road over them touches a 1:3 gradient in places, which makes it the steepest paved road in England. In winter it may be impassable altogether. The valley is enclosed by low fells — Castle Howe, Lingmoor — and beyond the passes there is no through road except in summer. There is no railway and no regular bus. You come by car from Ambleside via Skelwith Bridge, or over Wrynose from the Duddon Valley if you trust the weather.
What you get for the effort is a quiet side valley running southwest off Great Langdale, the tarn on the valley floor, and a pub named after a man who spent his life not getting caught. On a still evening you can stand by the tarn and hear nothing at all, which up here is the whole point.
