Framed on a wall inside the Queen's Head Inn is an original indenture recording that William Wordsworth's brother Richard once owned the pub. William helped manage it until Richard came of age. The paperwork is still there, hanging on the wall.
The Queen's Head was built in 1719, and it looks it. Original flagstone and timber flooring, oak beams, wooden settles, stone walls two feet thick. Above the fireplace are the original meat hooks, once used for smoking meats. Three hundred years of bric-a-brac and memorabilia have accumulated on the walls, and nobody seems in a hurry to take any of it down.
The kitchen runs to nine different home-made pies with local meats. There are several burgers, roast dinners and seasonal specials too, with vegan and gluten-free options among them. It is hearty, home-cooked food.
It is also more or less the whole reason to stop in Tirril, because there are no shops in the village and no church either. If you want a loaf of bread, you leave. For a Sunday service you go to St Peter's at Yanwath or St Peter's at Askham.
The beer has a history of its own. In September 1999 the Tirril Brewery was set up behind the pub, one of the early Cumbrian microbreweries. It now operates separately — Robinson's holds the tie on the Queen's Head these days — but it started here, out the back.
Tirril sits in the Eden Valley limestone country, on the eastern fringe of the Lake District, right on the edge of the National Park boundary. This is the gently rolling agricultural land between Penrith and Ullswater, quiet and given over to farming, and there is not a great deal to it beyond the pub and the lanes.
The lake is two and a half miles away, close enough that the Ullswater shorepath and the Ullswater Way long-distance route are within reach on foot, if you don't mind the walk out and the walk back.
Closer to hand, the Eden Valley lanes make for flat, unhurried walking and cycling, the sort you can do without a map or a plan. A short drive gets you to Pooley Bridge and the hill fort at Dunmallet.
There is no railway. You arrive by car, on the B5320 from Penrith toward Pooley Bridge, or up from Ullswater the other way. Penrith is about five miles north. The buses from Penrith exist but are limited, so a car is the sensible option.
What Tirril amounts to is a pub, some good walking, and the road to the lake. On a wet afternoon, with a pie in front of you and Wordsworth's paperwork hanging on the wall, that turns out to be enough.
