The Yanwath Gate Inn is a 17th-century inn on the edge of a hamlet that has no shop, no church, and no bus. It is also, on the evidence, one of the better places to eat for miles. The man who runs the kitchen came from Rogan & Co, Simon Rogan's restaurant down in Cartmel, and took the place over in late 2017. Before that it had spent the best part of two years shut.
The reason it was shut is worth knowing. In December 2015, Storm Desmond destroyed both the Eamont Bridge and Pooley Bridge, and Yanwath, a small place already, found itself cut off. The inn stayed closed for weeks, then longer, and only reopened when it was revived as a gastropub.
The menu runs from steak and ale pie and lasagne to lamb rump with cauliflower purée and sweet potato fondant, honey and ginger pork belly, and orange-seared tilapia. There is a Menu Rapide as well — two or three courses at a set price from a changing shortlist, for people who want to be fed rather than to deliberate. The pub was named Cumbria Dining Pub of the Year six times between 2007 and 2013, which is the sort of record that stops being luck.
There is no church here either. The parish church is over at Barton, a short way off, which is where you go for that sort of thing.
The other reason to come here is Yanwath Hall, on the edge of the village. It is a medieval hall house — a 14th-century pele tower with an attached hall range — and one of the best-preserved examples of its kind in Cumbria. It is Grade I listed, still lived in, and privately occupied, so you admire it from the public path rather than the doorstep. Pele towers were built for a border that spent centuries being fought over; this one has simply kept standing.
Yanwath sits on the floor of the Eden Valley, flat agricultural land two miles south of Penrith, with the River Eamont running past it. The Eamont drains Ullswater northward, and you can follow the riverside paths one way toward Penrith or the other toward the lake, level going the whole distance. Ullswater itself is four miles off, close enough to pick up the Ullswater Way, the long-distance route that loops the water.
Getting here means a car. There is no railway and no regular bus; the B5320 from Penrith toward Pooley Bridge passes nearby, and that is the whole of it.
What you get, then, is a hamlet with almost nothing in it except a very good pub and a house that has outlasted the border it was built to guard.
