The Wheatsheaf sits on the valley floor in Low Lorton, with a campsite behind it and two rooms inside kept warm by real fires. It has been a pub since 1847, converted from the farmstead of a man called Henry Fletcher, and it is the only pub left in Lorton. That gives it a certain weight of responsibility, which it carries without fuss.
The menu is unfussy too: shepherd's pie, lasagne, a choice of burgers, vegetarian options, a children's menu. You eat it looking west, where the panorama of the fells does most of the decorating. On a fine evening the outdoor tables and the campground behind fill up, and the western sky over Grasmoor and Mellbreak takes its time going dark.
Lorton is really two villages. Low Lorton is the one on the valley floor, with the pub. High Lorton climbs the eastern hillside above it, and the two have been separated since 1158, when High Lorton was handed to Carlisle Cathedral Priory. The dividing line — Church Lane — still runs between them, which is a long time for a boundary to survive an administrative decision.
St Cuthbert's Church stands on that line, between the two settlements. A chaplain was recorded here in 1198; the present building was rebuilt in 1807-9. In 2020 it won a Gold Eco Church Award, which is a modern distinction for a very old parish.
There are no shops. For those you drive to Cockermouth, north up the vale. What Lorton has instead is what surrounds it.
To the east the ground rises into Whinlatter Forest, which bills itself as Britain's only mountain forest — 3,000 acres of trail. There are mountain bike routes, walking paths, and an osprey viewpoint. Ospreys have nested here since 2011, the first breeding pair in England in a century and a half.
South of the village the vale runs down to Crummock Water. From its shore you can walk to Scale Force, the highest waterfall in the Lake District at 170 feet, tucked in a wooded ravine that keeps it hidden until you're almost on it. Above the lake sits Rannerdale Knotts, famous for its bluebells in spring.
Lorton's other claim is a tree. Wordsworth wrote a poem about an ancient yew that grows here and called it "the pride of Lorton Vale." The yew is still standing, which is more than can be said for most things a poet has admired.
Getting here means a car. There is no railway — Workington, the nearest station, is fifteen miles west — so you come over Whinlatter Pass on the B5289 from Keswick, or up the B5292 from Cockermouth. In summer the seasonal 77 and 77A buses, the Honister Rambler, run from Keswick through Braithwaite and on to Buttermere, stopping in Lorton on the way.
The brewery that became a national name started here. John Jennings founded it in High Lorton around 1828, then moved it to Cockermouth in 1881. The old malthouse he left behind became the village hall in 1909, and it is called Yew Tree Hall, after the tree.
