Footpaths lead out of the Mill Inn's beer garden and go straight up Blencathra. Not to a lane that eventually meets a path that climbs the fell — up it, from where you're sitting with your pint. The garden looks up at the mountain, and the mountain is 868 metres, and the walk to the top starts at the gate.
The Mill Inn is a 17th-century coaching inn, two miles off the A66 in the Glenderamackin valley, and it is more or less the whole of Mungrisdale's public life. It serves Robinsons beer, it's in the CAMRA guide, and it does food all day from eight in the morning until nine at night. The steak and ale pie is the thing people write about — one TripAdvisor reviewer called it the "Best steak and real ale pie ever," and the reviews agree it arrives packed with steak and generously sized. There are Cumberland sausages with mash, fish and chips, burgers, salads, daily specials built from Cumbrian produce. On the last Friday of the month there's a fish and chips night. Upstairs there are seven rooms.
Beyond the pub, there is not much village to speak of, and no shops at all — the nearest are in Keswick or Penrith. This is a hamlet in one of the quietest valleys in the Northern Lake District, and it stays quiet partly because getting here takes effort. There's no railway and no regular bus. You come by car, two miles down a minor road off the A66, or you don't come.
The walking is the reason to. Blencathra by the Glenderamackin approach is the quiet way up a fell that's usually climbed from the busier side, and the valley path stays empty. St Kentigern's Church, with medieval origins, sits below it — dedicated to the Celtic saint also known as St Mungo, the one who founded Glasgow, and shared with a handful of other Cumbrian churches including Caldbeck's.
Then there's Souther Fell, the modest hump above the village, which has the strangest local record of anywhere in the Lakes. In 1735, and again in 1737 and 1745, groups of people watched an army march across its summit in perfect formation — hundreds of soldiers, ranks and files, moving along the top of the fell. It happened more than once and was seen by more than one person each time. Sir William Stanhope investigated it at the time. Nobody has explained it since. It remains one of the most extensively witnessed supernatural events in English history, which is a strange sentence to write about a fell most people drive past without noticing.
Souther Fell itself is a short, unremarkable walk, ghost army or no. The valley is the point: fells rising directly out of the fields, one pub with the door open, and the water of the Glenderamackin running through the middle of it, doing what it did before anyone thought they saw soldiers on the hill.
