The Ratty Arms is a pub owned and run by a railway company. When the Beeching era left Ravenglass station unmanned and British Rail had no further use for the buildings, the little railway next door bought them and opened a pub on the platform on 13 June 1974. Some seats are arranged in rows like an old railway carriage, and you can watch the mainline trains pull in from your table. There are four regular cask ales — Hawkshead Bitter, Tirril Borrowdale Bitter, Great Corby Stout and Bowness Bay Swan Blonde — plus two guests, and the pub takes a certain pride in stocking nothing brewed outside Cumbria or north-west Lancashire. The fish and chips come in a crisp beer batter, and the Cumberland sausage arrives with egg, chips and all the trimmings. Dogs are welcome in every part of the building, indoors and out, with water bowls and a biscuit or two provided.
Ravenglass is the only coastal village in the Lake District National Park: a single street of cottages running down to the water at the point where three rivers — the Esk, the Mite and the Irt — arrive from three separate valleys and meet the Irish Sea. At the highest tides the estuary comes up to the foot of Main Street, which ends in a slipway onto the sands. The street itself is the medieval market place, deliberately narrowed at both ends to pen animals in. The 1841 census counted 337 people. Look west on a clear day and you can see the Isle of Man.
The railway that owns the pub is the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway, known locally as La'al Ratty — Cumbrian dialect for "little track". It opened in 1875 to haul iron ore down from the mines around Boot, went bankrupt, closed entirely in 1913, was rescued and re-gauged to fifteen inches by the model-maker W. J. Bassett-Lowke, and was rescued again in 1960 when a preservation society bought the whole thing at auction in Gosforth Public Hall for £12,000. It now carries 120,000 passengers a year, seven miles up Eskdale to Dalegarth for Boot, about forty minutes each way, with up to sixteen trains a day in summer; 2026 is its 150th anniversary season. An adult return is £25, a child £16, under-fives free, dogs £5 a day. One of the engines, River Irt, was built in 1894 and is the oldest working fifteen-inch-gauge steam locomotive in the world. If it all feels familiar from a children's book, that is because the Reverend W. Awdry based the Small Railway in the Thomas the Tank Engine series on this line — his engines Bert, Rex and Mike are the real River Irt, River Esk and River Mite.
The station complex is effectively the village centre. The mainline and narrow-gauge platforms sit side by side, so you can arrive by ordinary train from Carlisle or Barrow — the Coast Line runs roughly hourly, and Northern sells through tickets that include the Ratty — and cross the platform to a steam train. A café on Platform 1 called 1876, after the year the line first carried passengers, serves hot pies and meals made to order. There is a gift shop, a children's play area above the engine turntable, and a free railway museum in the old waiting shelter covering 150 years of the line plus the Roman port.
The gift shop matters more than it sounds, because it is essentially the only shop in the village. Ravenglass has no bakery, butcher or grocer; Main Street is otherwise residential. The nearest proper bakery is Gosforth, six miles up the coast road, where Gillian Unsworth has been baking since January 1980 — she started with thirteen Cornish pasties for local workmen, and her daughter Rachel now works alongside her. Up the valley, Eskdale Stores in Eskdale Green — run by Mark and Ann-Marie since 2007 — sells Cumberland sausage, sticky toffee puddings and craft ales downstairs and walking boots upstairs, and can be reached by the Ratty.
What the village lacks in shops it makes up in places to eat, all within about 150 metres of each other. The Inn at Ravenglass, a seventeenth-century inn at the north end of Main Street, until recently the Holly House Hotel, made its name as a seafood house: the Pennington family recruited a chef who had worked for the Roux brothers, Craig Niven, and the daily catch — supplied by Steve Hallett of Ravenglass Fish & Game — has been known to arrive minutes before service. The specials filled three handwritten blackboards headed "In Cod we trust" and "Skate, Rattle and Sole", and the kitchen's Scottish flourish was a deep-fried Mars bar in Irn-Bru batter with Buckfast ice cream. Recent visitors report bouillabaisse with monkfish, seafood spaghetti and quadruple-cooked chips, though the food operation has fluctuated in recent years — check before you arrive hungry. The bar keeps Fyne Ales Jarl and two Jennings beers plus three guests, and well-behaved dogs are fussed over in the bar, though not the dining room. It has exactly two letting rooms, one with a standalone bath and windows over the estuary.
Next door, the Pennington Hotel opened as the Pennington Arms in 1849 and belongs — like the Inn, and a good deal else around here — to the Muncaster Castle estate. Its Estuary Bar & Grill is run by a Cumbrian head chef, Helen, who takes fruit and vegetables from the castle's own gardens. The menu runs from a Cumberland sausage and caramelised red onion sandwich at £7.95 up through steak and ale pie and beer-battered haddock, the bar stocks more than fifty gins, and dogs dine with their owners in the Morning Room, a sixteen-cover dining room. Booking is recommended, which tells you something about who holidays here.
Then there is the ice cream. Sam and Andy Bowden of Bootle dreamed up Ravenglass Handmade Ice Cream during the first Covid lockdown, started with a cart at local events in 2021, and now run a parlour in the village making everything in-house. The flavour list is not cautious: sea buckthorn, red bean paste, black ginger, salted liquorice, dragonfruit, Kendal Mint Cake, Sticky Toffee Pudding, and a signature called the Ravenglass Storm. There is a vegan range, a doggie ice cream, and an Honesty Hut — a self-serve hut where you pay on trust. A few doors along, Sarah Bell runs the Estuary Views tea room inside the Victorian Rosegarth guest house, serving cakes and tray bakes with the water out of the window; the attached gallery permanently shows the reduction linocuts of her brother, the Ravenglass printmaker Mark A. Pearce.
The walking starts at sea level, because this is the only village in the national park on the coast. Walls Drive, from the station car park, is an official Miles Without Stiles route graded "for all" — a mile of tarmac suitable for wheelchairs and pushchairs, leading to the Roman bath house. A level beach circular of about three and a half miles loops along the shore and back past the cottages, with one firm caveat: the estuary paths flood on big tides, so avoid the two hours either side of high water when the tide tops 7.2 metres. The serious local walk is the traverse of Muncaster Fell to Dalegarth — allow five hours over Hooker Crag at 231 metres, notoriously boggy in the middle, with the Scafells ahead and the sea behind — riding the Ratty back down. Wainwright wrote of it: "The supreme joy of Muncaster Fell is the delectable traverse of its ridge ... Here is enchantment." On the summit ridge you pass Ross's Camp, a large flat slab hoisted onto boulders as a luncheon table by a Victorian shooting party and inscribed ROSS'S CAMP 1883. It looks convincingly like a prehistoric dolmen. It is a picnic table.
Families can do the same valley without the bog. The Eskdale Trail runs the length of the line, waymarked by 22 metal fingerposts each carrying a brass-rubbing plate — the stations sell a trail pack with paper and crayons so children collect the rubbings as they go. Bikes travel up on a converted carriage and the pedal back to the sea takes about two hours. From Dalegarth you can walk to Stanley Ghyll Force, a sixty-foot waterfall in a rhododendron-hung gorge with a steel viewing platform jutting over the drop, or to Eskdale Mill at Boot, the national park's last working water-powered corn mill. Boot itself supports three pubs, and every June they jointly host the Boot Beer Festival — over 140 ales, born after the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak emptied the valley, traditionally opened with a curry night at the Brook House Inn. The Boot Inn, in a building of about 1578, takes dogs everywhere including the guest bedrooms. So a day trip from Ravenglass can be: steam train up, waterfall, beer festival, steam train back, nobody driving.
A mile from the village stands Muncaster Castle, where the Pennington family have lived since around 1208. The Hawk & Owl Centre flies birds of prey daily in season, there are seventy-seven acres of grounds, and at the May Festival of Fools competing jesters contest the title of Fool of Muncaster — the castle claims to be the only historic home in Britain that still appoints an official one, and the prize is a suit of jester's clothes and a quantity of beer. The post commemorates Thomas Skelton, the castle's seventeenth-century jester, popularly linked to the word "tomfoolery" and, in local legend, to directing travellers he disliked into the estuary quicksands. The castle café, Creeping Kate's Kitchen, is named after a family racehorse and does a Sunday roast from 10.30am, no booking required. In summer the Wasdale Explorer bus leaves from beside the station on weekends — £3 all day, children free, dogs allowed — calling at the castle on its way to Wasdale Head and England's deepest lake. Drivers come in on the A595, about two hours from Manchester.
The history underneath all this is Roman. Eight hundred metres along Walls Drive stand the remains of the fort's bath house, its walls nearly four metres high — the best-preserved Roman military bath house in England, with patches of original plaster on the walls and a niche with a red arch in the changing room. For centuries locals took it for a medieval ruin and called it Walls Castle; legend made it the palace of King Eveling, king of the fairies, and it was only identified as a bath house in 1919. The fort behind it was garrisoned for roughly three hundred years by the First Cohort of Hadrian's Marines — five hundred men guarding the harbour where three rivers made a natural anchorage — and in 1849 the Victorians drove the mainline railway straight through its western defences. Ravenglass has no Domesday entry, because in 1086 Cumbria was not in England; the village's founding document is instead King John's charter of 1208 for a Saturday market and a St James fair. By 1297 it was a listed port, and when the channels silted up it turned, with some commitment, to smuggling brandy and tobacco over from the Isle of Man — the Bay Horse on Main Street, an inn dated 1764 and now a private house, is said to have had a tunnel to the Ship Inn across the road. The River Irt once yielded dark freshwater pearls.
In 1995, fragments of a bronze Roman military diploma turned up on the foreshore beside the fort — the discharge papers of a marine, son of one Cassius, possibly recruited in Syria, granted his Roman citizenship in AD 158 after twenty-five years' service. One of the fragments was found by a dog. The published accounts preserve the soldier's father, his unit, his likely home town and the exact date of his discharge, but not the dog's name — which, for a village that remembers this much, feels like an oversight.
