Caton

Caton's coaching inns

The Station Hotel is named after a railway station that shut in 1966. The station is gone, its trackbed now a footpath, but the pub keeps the name and the coaching-inn bones it was built with in the 18th century. Inside there are over six hand-pulls of local cask ale, plus gin, whisky and wine if the ale doesn't appeal. The menu runs from pizzas and burgers to Sunday roasts, with a dedicated gluten-free list and vegetarian and vegan options. Dogs are allowed, and out the back there's a beer garden and a bowling green.

The Ship Inn, over on Lancaster Road, is the other option, with a separate restaurant called the Galleon and a home-cooked bar menu. Dogs and children are welcome. It sits about five minutes from the M6.

The oak and the river bend

For a long time an ancient oak stood beside the Ship, reputedly of druidic age and photographed in good health as far back as 1905. By the 1990s it needed metal supports. "The tree is the most important landmark in Caton and we should try to preserve it as long as there is any life in it at all," a parish councillor said in 1996. It finally came down on 20 June 2016. Beneath it stood the Fish Stones, medieval sandstone steps where monks of Cockersand Abbey once laid out salmon for sale.

The real draw is the river. A mile or so out, the Lune swings through a great horseshoe bend called the Crook o' Lune, meadows on one side and a wooded gorge on the other, with Ingleborough visible on the skyline up the valley. Turner painted it. Thomas Gray described "the river Lune winding in a deep valley, its hanging banks clothed with fine woods," and the viewpoint where you get the best of it is now named Gray's Seat. William Wilberforce came in 1779 and called the view "the finest of the kind I ever beheld."

Greenway, moorland and mills

You can walk the riverside path from the Crook o' Lune picnic site, or take the Greenway, the old railway line, which runs flat and hard-surfaced for six miles all the way into Lancaster. It is level enough for buggies and bikes. There are picnic sites with car parks, toilets and seasonal refreshments at Crook o' Lune and at Bull Beck.

Behind all this the parish climbs to open moorland, over four thousand acres of it, under Clougha Pike and Ward's Stone on the Bowland Fells. The village itself once ran on water. Up to eight mills worked the Artle Beck, spinning cotton, silk and flax; by Nelson's time Caton was one of the main suppliers of sails to both the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy. A Roman milestone eight feet long, bearing Hadrian's name, turned up in the beck in 1803.

St Paul's Norman doorway

St Paul's, over at Brookhouse, was mostly rebuilt in the 1860s, but a blocked Norman doorway survives in the north aisle, its carved tympanum showing Adam and Eve and the serpent.

The next Caton Oak

When the old oak was clearly failing, someone planted one of its acorns nearby in 2007, to raise the next one.