The Mortal Man has a painted inn sign that carries a rhyme: "O mortal man that lives by bread / What is it makes thy nose so red? / Thou silly fool, that look'st so pale, / 'Tis drinking Sally Birkett's ale." It is a teasing verse aimed at a neighbouring tavern-keeper, and it has been hanging on a pub that dates to 1689.
The pub is a traditional Lakeland inn, and it is the centre of things in Troutbeck. Food comes out noon to three and five to nine every day: Cheddar and Cumbrian pickle sandwiches, fish and chips, Cumberland sausage with mash, sharing platters, with vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free versions of most of it. Sundays bring roast dinners until five. There are five hand-pulled ales that change weekly, one of them the pub's own "Whitehouse 1689" and another a gluten-free ale, which covers most of the ways a person might want to drink.
Out the back is a large beer garden with views across the Troutbeck Valley. The Times voted it one of the top ten beer gardens in the UK. Dogs are welcome throughout, garden and evenings included.
Troutbeck is not laid out the way villages usually are. There is no green. Instead it is a series of small hamlets — Town End, Town Head, High Green and others — strung along a lane on the eastern hillside above the valley, each cluster with its own well or spring. The wells are named too: High Well, Middle Well, Low Well. Some of them still survive.
A gentle walk along the valley floor takes you past those wells and the traditional farms, which is the easiest way to see how the place is put together. For something with more effort in it, Wansfell Pike is a moderate three-mile climb to a Wainwright fell, with views over Windermere; return via Ambleside and you have a circuit. Higher still, the Ill Bell ridge starts from the village and connects up to High Street.
At the north end is Townend House, built in 1626 for the Browne family, wealthy yeoman farmers known as "statesmen." They stayed until 1943, when the house passed to the National Trust, and they left it more or less as it was — spinning galleries, dark oak furniture, carved woodwork, farm implements that had not moved in generations. It is one of the finest surviving statesman's farmhouses in the Lakes, and it reads as a time capsule of rural life before industry arrived. There is a National Trust gift shop.
Jesus Church is Grade II listed and dates from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its east window is the thing to look at: a Pre-Raphaelite window made by William Morris & Co in the 1870s, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, with the foliage done by William Morris himself and some details by Ford Madox Brown. The Browne family of Townend worshipped here for centuries.
There is no bus to Troutbeck. You reach it by car up a narrow lane from Windermere on the A592, or from the A591 via Wain Lane, with Windermere itself about two miles south.
Whitehouse 1689 is still on the pump, named after the year the pub started pouring it.
