The Horse & Farrier Inn has been serving drinks on the same spot since 1688, which is over three hundred years of continuous hospitality at the foot of one mountain. Inside there are slate flagged floors, beamed ceilings and an open fire, and it is a Jennings house, so the taps run to four of theirs — Bitter, Cocker Hoop, Cumberland Ale and Sneck Lifter — plus a guest. There are fourteen en-suite rooms upstairs, in case you want to stay after the Sneck Lifter.
The kitchen keeps it Lakeland. Breaded garlic mushrooms and a Farrier prawn cocktail to start; then traditional Cumberland sausage, a Lakeland beef burger, or if you're not eating meat, a bean and celery chilli or mushroom stroganoff. The Sunday roast uses locally sourced meats, including Threlkeld lamb, which does not have far to travel. Between two and five each afternoon there's a sandwich menu, for the hours when you want less than a roast.
The mountain in question is Blencathra, also called Saddleback, 868 metres of it directly above the village. Most people go up by Hall's Fell Ridge, which is the manageable way. The other way is Sharp Edge, a narrow arête that gets compared to Striding Edge on Helvellyn and is not for anyone who dislikes exposure or the idea of a long drop on both sides at once. It is one of the finest fells in the northern Lakes, and it is essentially the village's back garden.
If the ridge feels like a lot, the Glenderaterra Valley runs east into the fells and stays quiet and level. Two miles west is Castlerigg Stone Circle, Neolithic, put up around 3000 BC on one of the most dramatically sited pieces of ground in Britain. People have been finding this valley worth settling for a very long time — roughly five thousand years, on the Neolithic evidence.
The name is older than English. It comes from Old Norse and means, near enough, "the well of the thrall" — a thrall being a man bound in service to his lord. The Norse who named it presumably had opinions about the arrangement.
For a while the village was busier than it looks now. When zinc and lead turned up at the start of the twentieth century, the granite quarry became a minor boom town, employing over a hundred men, and terraced houses went up to house them. Those terraces are still there. So is the quarry, now the Threlkeld Quarry and Mining Museum, with a working narrow-gauge railway, a shop, and a large collection of industrial mining equipment. The village had its own station on the Cockermouth, Keswick and Penrith Railway, on the far side of the valley beside the quarry. The line is closed and the trackbed is a cycle path now, so you can still follow it, just not by train.
The River Glenderamackin runs below the houses, the A66 runs past just outside them, and the Keswick–Penrith bus stops in the village. Keswick itself is four miles west. St Mary's Church, medieval underneath and mostly nineteenth-century on top, sits with Skiddaw to the north and Helvellyn away to the south, which is a fair view for a Sunday.
