Stonethwaite

Where the lane ends

The single-track lane from Rosthwaite runs for about a mile and then stops. It stops at the Langstrath Country Inn, because there is nowhere else for it to go — no through road, no continuation, just the pub, the beck, and the fells closing in behind. Stonethwaite is what happens at the end of the road.

The hamlet sits in the Langstrath valley, east of the main Borrowdale valley, with Stonethwaite Beck running through to join the River Derwent back at Rosthwaite. Eagle Crag, Sergeant's Crag and Greenup Gill stand around it. It is one of the most isolated and atmospheric places in the Lake District, which is a phrase that gets used loosely, but here the road really does dead-end and the map really does run out of names.

From miners' cottage to country inn

The Langstrath Inn started as a miners' cottage around 1590, when the Langstrath valley had enough mining to justify the building. It was called Dove Cottage first, then Langstrath Cottage, then a B&B at the start of the twentieth century, and it expanded considerably after the war. The bar is small and traditional with an open fire. There are two changing ales — Tractor Shed or Tirril — and eleven en-suite bedrooms above.

The kitchen does homemade steak and ale pie, beer-battered haddock, an 8oz beef burger or the vegan Moving Mountain version, and a Cumberland farmhouse cheese plate. Lunch runs noon to four. The beer garden looks straight out at the surrounding fells, and dogs get one dog-friendly room with a fenced garden. It is, by most reckonings, one of the most isolated pubs in the Lake District. There is no church here — the nearest are at Rosthwaite or Grange-in-Borrowdale — and no shop either, so Rosthwaite a mile away is where you go for anything the inn doesn't provide.

Valley paths and the Coast to Coast

The walking is why most people come. Behind the village the Langstrath valley leads south past Sergeant's Crag and Eagle Crag towards Stake Pass, one of the more dramatic side valleys in Borrowdale and remote in a way that a mile of single-track lane only begins to prepare you for. Another route climbs Greenup Gill past Lining Crag and over Greenup Edge to drop down into Grasmere.

That last one is a version of Alfred Wainwright's Coast to Coast Walk, which passes directly through Stonethwaite on its 190 miles from St Bees to Robin Hood's Bay. Walkers reach here on about Day 4 or 5 and tend to stop overnight, which is a large part of why an eleven-bedroom inn survives at the end of a lane that goes nowhere.

One road in, one road out

There is no railway and no regular bus. You come by car, down the single-track lane, and you leave the same way, because there is only the one way. In the evening the bar fills with people who have walked all day and worked up an appetite, and the fire does the rest.