There is a hundred-foot lighthouse on the hill above Ulverston, and it has never once shown a light. Trinity House, one of the largest donors to its construction, gave its money on the strict condition that the lighthouse-shaped monument must never carry a working lamp, and it never has. The Hoad Monument was built in 1850–51 as a copy of Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse, from limestone quarried on Birkrigg Common, paid for by £1,250 of public subscription, to commemorate Sir John Barrow — born at Dragley Beck on the edge of town, Second Secretary to the Admiralty for forty years, and organiser of many of Britain's Arctic expeditions. On Sundays from Easter to the end of October you can climb the 112 spiral steps to the lantern chamber, free; a flag on the hilltop means it's open. The walk up from the town centre takes about twenty minutes, and the view takes in Morecambe Bay, the Furness Peninsula, and the southern fells.
Ulverston itself is a market town of about 11,500 people on the Furness Peninsula, a few miles south of the National Park boundary, with the Leven estuary on one side and Coniston Old Man visible in the hills to the north. Windermere is six miles away, Coniston Water eight. The market charter was granted by Edward I in 1280 and the market still runs — outdoor stalls on Market Street every Thursday and Saturday, and an indoor Market Hall open five days a week with cheese stalls and fresh bread. The market cross at the top of the street is iron, put up in 1821, and the streets around it are cobbled.
The town brewed its own beer continuously for around 236 years, from about 1755 until Hartley's Brewery closed in 1991, and it has never quite got out of the habit. Most of the town-centre pubs are still Robinsons houses, a legacy of the Stockport brewer buying Hartley's in 1982, and there are more good ones than a town this size strictly needs. The Rose on King Street was built in the 1500s and has original oak beams, log fires, four Robinsons ales, and a room named after Sid, the baker who ran the bakery next door for over eighty years. A hatch connected the two buildings: Sid passed fresh loaves through to the bar, took pints in return, and played cards with his friends in the room that now carries his name. Locals still keep the card games going.
The Farmers, on the market square, is run by the same family — the Chattaways, fifth-generation publicans who have had it for more than two decades. The building is sixteenth-century and was originally The Pack Horse. The kitchen does slow-cooked beef brisket, Cajun chicken, and mussels and langoustines in a creamy sauce, and breakfast on the garden patio from nine. Dogs are outside seating only here, because nearly everywhere else in town they're not.
Old Friends, two hundred metres uphill on Soutergate, is a former sea captain's house that started brewing its own beer in a back room in 2019; the beers are available nowhere else. There's a snug with an open fire, a heated beer garden, and a guitar and piano that anyone is allowed to play. The Sun Inn, an eighteenth-century coaching inn on Market Street, has twenty B&B rooms, smash burgers on the menu, and a nightclub in the basement. The Mill worked as the town's mill until the 1970s — parts of the building date back to the twelfth century — and the original waterwheel still stands in the middle of the ground-floor bar; Lancaster Brewery, who bought the place in 2009, keep somewhere between eight and ten real ales on, depending on which of their own pages you believe.
The Stan Laurel Inn, on The Ellers, was called The Britannia until 1976, when it was renamed for the town's most famous son, who was born round the corner. Up to six handpulls include their own-badged Stan's Ale, there are two log-burning stoves in winter, the menu runs from teriyaki chicken to pork forestière to fisherman's pie, and dogs are welcome in the bar and games room.
The brewing tradition carries on outside the pubs too. Ulverston Brewing Company was founded in the mid-2000s in direct response to the loss of Hartley's, and names its beers after Laurel and Hardy films: Another Fine Mess, Laughing Gravy, Lonesome Pine. Shed One Distillery was launched in 2016 by Zoe and Andy Arnold-Bennett in their actual garden shed, before moving to The Old Calf Shed in 2019. Their first gin, Cuckold's Revenge, is named after Master Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor — the role Andy, a professional actor, was touring when the distillery started. It holds a Great Taste Award, and in 2025 it was served in a House of Lords bar. They also make a collaboration gin with Irini Tzortzoglou, the 2019 MasterChef champion, who lives locally. Tours, tastings and make-your-own-spirit sessions start from £18, booking essential.
For dinner with a view, drive out to Canal Foot, where the Bay Horse Hotel sits on the Leven estuary. It's a seventeenth-century coaching inn where travellers once rested before crossing the Morecambe Bay sands to Lancaster, and the Guardian named it among the top ten inns with waterside views. Chef-owner Robert Lyons spent seventeen years as head chef at Miller Howe on Windermere under John Tovey, and the cooking keeps the Tovey trademarks — tureens of soup with home-baked breads, terrines, Lakeland produce. He and Lesley have been at the heart of the place for nearly four decades. The conservatory dining room watches the tide come and go, and occasionally a steam special crosses the Leven viaduct while you eat. Dogs are welcome in the bar; children get homemade ice cream.
In town, the eating runs deep for a place this size. Gillam's Tearoom on Market Street belongs to a family who have traded in Ulverston since 1892, when John James Gillam opened his grocer's on the same street; his great-great-grandson Doug and Doug's wife Shirley opened the tearoom opposite in 2006. Everything is organic and vegetarian, the loose-leaf teas are single-estate, and there's a specialist grocer's attached. Poppies, opposite the town clock, does a large full English and serves Afternoon Cheese from Thursday to Saturday. Amigos, the town's only Mexican restaurant, ranks second of sixty-two restaurants in town from nearly a thousand reviews — book at weekends. L'al Churrasco does Spanish and Portuguese food tapas-style; "l'al" is Cumbrian dialect for little.
The fish and chips deserve their own sentence. Priory Place was named one of the top forty chip shops in the UK in the 2024 National Fish and Chip Awards, and Chippy Bank, trading since 1978, occupies a former Bank of Scotland branch at 7 King Street — hence the name.
Market Street handles the self-catering: Irvings the butcher, The Lake District Lobster & Seafood Co selling the catch of local inshore fishermen, Thomas Bakeries, and Sutton's Bookshop, with new and second-hand books across two floors of a two-hundred-year-old building. There's a Booths for everything else. And Cumbria Crystal is the last producer of completely hand-blown, hand-cut full lead crystal in the UK — it supplied most of the crystal on the formal tables in Downton Abbey, and you can watch the glassblowers at work.
The walking starts flat and gets steeper as you like. The canal towpath runs from Canal Head to Canal Foot along what John Rennie built in the 1790s, by repute the deepest, widest, straightest canal in the country — fifteen feet deep, sixty-six feet wide, dead straight to the sea, and only a mile and a quarter long. Halfway along stands the last rolling railway bridge in Britain, which slid open sideways on angled iron wheels rather than swinging; there's a working model beside it to explain itself. Gill Banks is a 1.9-mile circuit up a stream past a waterfall, thick with wild garlic and bluebells in spring; one field carries a public footpath sign warning of a bull. The Gill is also the official start of the Cumbria Way — seventy miles to Carlisle, with the first stage running fifteen and a half miles to Coniston. Two miles south, a three-mile circular from Bardsea beach crosses Birkrigg Common past a Bronze Age stone circle, one of only around thirty double-ring circles in the UK; a 1911 dig inside it found five cremation burials, one beneath an upturned urn. And from Canal Foot, a guided walk crosses the estuary sands to Chapel Island, led by the officially appointed Guide over Sands. Don't attempt it unguided — the bay is notorious for quicksands and the channels shift.
Families are well served. Ford Park, under Hoad Hill, is nine acres of community-owned parkland with a thirty-metre zip wire, free nature-trail guides from the Coach House Café, and a Saturday parkrun. Bardsea beach has free parking along the shore and a regular ice cream van, with Sea Wood next door — fifty-eight acres of ancient oak once owned by Lady Jane Grey, now one of the Woodland Trust's top ten bluebell woods.
Stan Laurel was born at 3 Argyle Street on 16 June 1890, and the town has never let it go. The Laurel & Hardy Museum, in the 1930s Roxy cinema, covers his early life and the duo's 105 films. Outside the Coronation Hall stands Graham Ibbeson's bronze of the pair — ten per cent larger than life, including Laughing Gravy the dog — unveiled by Ken Dodd in 2009 and paid for by the Sons of the Desert fan club, who raised £60,000 over seventeen years. Laurel and Hardy visited together in 1947 and were mobbed; on the Coronation Hall balcony, Stan was presented with a copy of his birth certificate.
The rest of the history is quickly told. Domesday records the town as Ulvrestun, six carucates held by one Turulf, filed under Yorkshire; the name comes from Úlfarr, wolf warrior. Scottish raiders under Robert the Bruce burned the town twice in the early 1300s, collapsing its assessed value from £35 to £5, and the market carried on anyway. George Fox preached at St Mary's in 1652, was knocked down and trampled by the congregation, then walked back out through the market — and the Quaker movement was organised from Swarthmoor Hall, a mile away, by Margaret Fell, who later married him. Conishead Priory, two miles south, has been a medieval priory, a Gothic mansion that bankrupted its builder, a spa hotel, a convalescent home for Durham miners, a wartime hospital, and — since 1976 — a Buddhist centre whose temple holds Europe's largest bronze Buddha, with a volunteer-run vegetarian cafe. And two miles west, under the railway line at Lindal, a locomotive that sank into a mining subsidence hole in 1892 is still down there. The driver, Thomas Postlethwaite, scrambled clear. The engine was never recovered.
Getting here is straightforward. The Grade II listed railway station, rebuilt in the 1870s with a clock tower, has direct trains to Lancaster and through trains to Manchester Airport; the A590 connects to the M6 at Levens; the X6 bus runs daily to Kendal and Barrow. Come in September and you'll meet the Lantern Festival, started in 1983 after a local arts company saw a candle-lit procession in Japan — thousands of handmade lanterns carried through the streets. Late November brings the Dickensian Christmas Festival. And each spring the streets fill with flags, hung at dawn by volunteers led by Peter "Mr Festival" Winston and repaired every February by a sewing circle.
Stan never really left, on the evidence of his letters. Writing home to England in January 1950, from the far side of a Hollywood career: "I used to go shopping on Market Street with Grandma Metcalfe - that was a big treat for me. Beers Treacle toffee, it sure was good!" The market is still there, twice a week, same as it ever was.
