The Herdwick Inn is an eighteenth-century coaching inn just off the A66, and its rooms look out at Blencathra. That is the arrangement of Penruddock in one sentence: a pub, a road, and a mountain. The village sits at the edge of the Lake District National Park, on the run between the M6 at Penrith and the central fells at Keswick, and most people passing through are on their way somewhere else. The ones who stop tend to stop at the inn.
It takes its name from the Herdwick, the native sheep of the Cumbrian fells — a hardy breed, heafed to their home ground, which means they know which patch of hillside is theirs and stay on it. Beatrix Potter kept them and wrote about them in her farming diaries at Hill Top. They also turn up on the menu.
The kitchen is serious about where the meat comes from. The Herdwick lamb is supplied by Harrison's butcher in Cockermouth. There is wild venison, locally sourced beef, and Cumberland sausage with local bacon at breakfast. The famous dish is the steak and ale pie. In the oak-beamed bar lounge you get pies, casseroles and steaks; the converted barn next door runs a seafood and grill à la carte menu, and there is a specials board for anyone who wants to be told what to eat.
Loweswater Gold Session Blonde is regularly on tap, alongside other Cumbrian ales — the inn is CAMRA listed, which is the pub equivalent of a character reference. In winter there is a large log fire. Dogs are welcome and so, unusually, are campers. The house line is "Eat – Drink – Sleep in the North Lakes," and it more or less delivers on all three.
The pub changed hands more than once recently. Admiral Taverns took it on from Marstons in 2019, it closed briefly in 2022, and it reopened under Gourmet Inns that September. It has settled since.
All Saints' Church is 450 metres up the road — a small Victorian parish church, doing the ordinary work of a village church without any particular fuss about it.
There is no shop. The nearest are Penrith, six miles east, and Keswick, nine miles west, so a stay here assumes a car and a bit of forward planning.
The walking is the reason to plan around it. Blencathra rises to the southwest, 868 metres of it, one of the finest fells in the northern Lakes and the mountain framed in the inn's bedroom windows. The classic route up is Sharp Edge, a genuine arête approached from Threlkeld or the Blencathra Centre, and not one to attempt casually. Closer to hand, Hutton Moor is open common land above the village, and a short drive south takes you into Greystoke Forest and the old Greystoke estate.
Getting here means the A66; the bus services along that corridor between Penrith and Keswick pass nearby, and Penrith, on the West Coast Main Line, is the closest station.
The Vale of Eden lies quietly to the east, and in winter the fire is lit.
