The Derby Arms stands on what used to be the packhorse route between Ulverston and Kendal, which is how an 18th-century coaching inn ends up in a village most people pass on the A590 without slowing down. It's a Georgian country inn, since refurbished, originally named after Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, who owned land here in the early 1800s. The kitchen does steak and ale pie, fish and chips in a crispy batter, gnocchi, sea bass, and a vegan ravioli, with hot and cold sandwiches at lunch and daily specials. Food runs noon to 2:30 and 5:30 to 8:30 on weekdays, and straight through to nine at weekends.
Behind the bar there are up to six real ales — the regulars are Bowness Bay Swan Blonde, Loweswater Gold and Hawkshead Bitter — and an extensive gin list to go with them.
Witherslack is a scattered village rather than a clustered one, spread under the Yewbarrow limestone escarpment where the Lyth Valley opens out between Grange-over-Sands and Kendal. The River Winster runs along the floor of it. The farmhouses are painted white, and the fields between them are full of damson trees.
This is Damson Country. The Lyth and Winster valleys have grown the fruit for centuries — in 1786 there were seventy orchards here. The trees blossom white in April and are picked in September. The crop went to jam makers, and the dark juice was used to dye textiles. It's now a Slow Food Ark of Taste product, which is a formal way of saying someone decided it was worth protecting. Every April the village holds a Damson Day festival for the blossom.
The walking divides neatly between the flat and the steep. On the valley floor you can go level through the orchards and farmland; above the village, Yewbarrow gives you a limestone escarpment and grassland thick with orchids. Next door is Whitbarrow Scar, a national nature reserve with one of the finest limestone pavements in England and rare flora that includes the dark-red helleborine orchid.
St Paul's was rebuilt around 1669 and consecrated in 1671, on a new site, replacing a chapel first recorded in 1542 that had been dedicated to St Mary. It's a plain Restoration-era church standing in farmland — the sort of building that doesn't announce itself.
In the 1700s the village kept charcoal burners, hoopmakers, and blacksmiths, who between them shod 352 horses working the packhorse routes. It's a precise figure for something that happened three hundred years ago.
There's no shop and no station. For both you drive the three miles to Grange-over-Sands, which sits on the Barrow-to-Lancaster line; the village itself is reached off the A590, or by the B5277 up from Grange. Buses run from Kendal and Grange, but the service is limited in the way that means you should bring a car.
Come in April and the whole valley turns white — blossom on the trees, paint on the farmhouses — for the few weeks before the fruit sets.
