The Cross Keys Inn has been serving the Lune Valley since the sixteenth century, back when the road it stood on was the main east–west route between the Lake District and North Yorkshire. That road is gone. The M6 runs past instead, with Junction 38 immediately west, but the inn is still here — cosy bar, open fire, CAMRA listed, pouring Black Sheep and Cumberland ales.
The kitchen keeps it local. The steak and ale pie comes with lean meat under crisp pastry and a plate of green vegetables; there's woodfired pizza, fish and chips, steaks, pasta, and a Sunday roast. Food runs twelve to three and five to nine. Out the back there's a garden with views, a children's play area, and free parking, which matters more than it should when the nearest alternative is the motorway services.
Which is the other reason people know Tebay.
Tebay Services opened in 1972 as the UK's first family-run motorway service area, built by the Dunning family on their own farm at Junction 38. The southbound farmshop sells farm-sourced produce and local artisan food, and is widely held to be the best motorway services in Britain. The Dunnings still run it, more than fifty years on.
The village itself is smaller than its reputation, and it grew up around the railway rather than the road. In the age of steam Tebay was a major junction on the West Coast Main Line, with banking engines stationed here to push heavy trains up the 1:75 climb to Shap. The locomotive depot closed in 1968 when steam ended, and the village shrank with it. The station went the same year; the nearest now are Oxenholme and Penrith.
What's left is the landscape, which was always the point.
East of the village rise the Howgill Fells — smooth, green, unenclosed, with almost no paths across them. Wainwright called them "a huddle of hills" and gave them a guide of their own. The Calf, at 676 metres, is the highest summit. Walkers use the Cross Keys as a base for getting up into them.
To the north the ground opens onto Shap Fell, a moorland plateau that was for centuries one of the most feared stretches of road and rail in England in winter. Below all of it, the River Lune has cut the Lune Gorge, and the M6 and the main railway line thread through the gap together — a great deal of infrastructure squeezed into a narrow, dramatic cleft.
St James's is the parish church, a small Victorian building that serves the village and doesn't try to do more than that.
The A685 climbs steeply east out of Tebay toward Kirkby Stephen, over Stainmore. Buses are limited, so you'll want a car — which most people arriving here already have, given how they got off the M6.
Late in the afternoon the Cross Keys fills up with people coming down off the Howgills, muddy boots by the fire, ordering the pie. The trains are never coming back, but the fells are still there, and so is the pub.
