Lowick is a two-pub parish, one at Lowick Green and one down at Lowick Bridge. This is a lot of pub for a village this small, and both have held on.
The Farmer's Arms is the one at Lowick Green, a 17th-century inn that CAMRA lists and the parish registered as an asset of community value in May 2020. It fires wood-fired pizza on Thursdays and cooks proper bar meals on Fridays and Saturdays — lamb stew with chips, roast beef with all the trimmings, cakes and desserts to follow. There is a beer garden, dogs are welcome, and the alcohol-free ales are, by local account, unusually good. The pub also runs classes and talks, which is not something most village inns bother with.
Down at Lowick Bridge, the Red Lion is the plainer of the two — an independent house keeping two regular ales and one that changes. It has been serving the bridge for a long time, back when a parish having two pubs was simply how things were.
The River Crake runs out of Coniston Water and passes under the bridge here on its way to the sea. Lowick sits near the southern tip of the lake, so the shorepath gives you flat lakeside walking, which is a rarer thing in this part of the world than you might expect. If you want height, the Blawith Fells rise open and unfenced to the northwest, and Grizedale Forest is three miles north, with Forestry England's bike and walking trails threaded through it.
There are no shops to speak of. A village hall, the community pub, and that is the amenities list. You do the weekly shop in Coniston or Ulverston.
The manor house is Lowick Hall, over at Lowick Bridge. The first lord of the manor was Ivo de Taillebois, a Norman baron who took the place in 1087, which makes this one of the older Norman holdings on the Furness peninsula. The village name turns up as "Lofwic" in 1202, and the roots of it are Norse — this was Viking country before it was Norman.
The church is St Luke's, medieval in origin, sitting quietly among all this.
The geography is worth understanding, because it explains why Lowick feels the way it does. This is the Furness peninsula — historic Lancashire, the part they called "north of the Sands," because for centuries the only way in was to walk across Morecambe Bay at low tide and hope your timing was right. Lowick lies between Coniston Water and the coast, tucked into that quieter corner.
Getting here now is easier but not effortless. There is no railway and no regular bus, so you arrive by car — the A5084 from Coniston or Ulverston, or the minor roads up from Haverthwaite.
On a Thursday evening the smell of wood-fired pizza drifts across Lowick Green, and the fell behind it goes dark, and that is about the size of it.
