Temple Sowerby

The inn and the village green

The Kings Arms sits on the village green, and it has been putting up travellers for four hundred years. It started as a coaching inn on the main east–west road through the Eden Valley — the road is now the A66, which passes just outside the village rather than through it, which is the better arrangement for everyone. The rooms are stylish, the food is well regarded, and if you'd rather not eat indoors they can also arrange fly fishing.

The kitchen leans heavily on pies. Steak and ale, game, cock-a-leekie, and a wild mushroom stroganoff pie for anyone who wants the pastry without the meat. Ingredients are locally sourced, the menu shifts with the seasons, and food is served seven days a week.

Beyond the pub, the village is mostly houses — red sandstone, clustered around a large green ringed with mature trees. There's a village hall and a primary school on the green, and not much else in the way of shops. This is not a place you come to for retail.

Queen of Westmorland by the Eden

It is a place people have thought highly of for a long time. Temple Sowerby has been called the "Queen of Westmorland Villages" for several hundred years, which is a considerable claim to have been sustaining without a shop.

The green is the reason. It's one of the most attractive in Cumbria — sandstone buildings on all sides, old trees, the River Eden running close by with riparian paths for anyone who wants a flat walk beside the water.

For a longer one, Acorn Bank is a short walk away. It's a National Trust property with medieval origins and a walled garden holding the largest collection of medicinal and culinary herbs in the north of England. The orchard grows traditional northern apple and pear varieties, and there's a working watermill, open seasonally.

Templars, Norse roots and St James's

The "Temple" in the name is not decoration. The estate at Acorn Bank belonged to a Knights Templar knight in the era of the crusades, and the village kept the association after the order itself was gone. The second half is less grand: "Sowerby" is Norse for "homestead with poor soil." So the full translation runs roughly to "the Templars' farm on bad ground," which the Queen of Westmorland Villages has quietly declined to advertise.

St James's Church is the eighteenth-century one on the site — built in 1754, rebuilt and enlarged in 1770, restored again in the 1870s. It has been reconstructed enough times that pinning it to a single century feels optimistic.

Arrival and the garden's long memory

Getting here means driving. There's no railway; the nearest station is Penrith, about eight miles west, and the bus services along the A66 corridor are the limited-rural sort that reward owning a car. From Penrith you head east on the A66 and turn off before the traffic notices you've gone.

The herb garden at Acorn Bank has been kept up since the Middle Ages. Somebody has been tending the same beds, more or less, since a Templar owned the ground under them.