The Greyhound on Low Road will put two rump steaks, trimmings and a bottle of house wine in front of you for £25 a head on a Saturday, and on Wednesdays a homemade pie with peas and gravy plus a pint for £12. Karen and Chris run it, and reviewers keep singling out Chris by name. Stone-baked pizzas go out from five till eight, the Sunday roasts have a following, and one TripAdvisor reviewer called the place "well worth a diversion off the M6." The walls carry CAMRA and Timothy Taylor awards — it belongs to Timothy Taylor's Champion Club — and the readers of the Lancaster Guardian voted it the best community pub in the bay. Dogs welcome. There's a big beer garden for when the sun shines.
A few doors along is The Centre @ Halton, a community centre run by a local charity. Its coffee shop does home-made cakes, sandwiches and ice creams at weekends and becomes a free Warm Welcome Space in the colder months. Outside there's a floodlit skatepark, a playground, boules, a games area and a playing field. The village also keeps a primary school and a post office going.
Halton sits on the north bank of the Lune, three miles east of Lancaster, and the river is most of the point. The Lune Greenway follows a disused railway line — smooth, level, traffic-free — six miles from Lancaster to Caton, passing the village on its way to the Crook o' Lune, a wooded meander bent like the handle of a shepherd's crook. Turner painted it. It's flat enough for a buggy and full of dogs.
St Wilfrid's church has a sixteenth-century tower that outlasted two full rebuilds of everything around it, the last by the Lancaster firm Paley and Austin in the 1870s. Anglo-Saxon carvings are kept inside the tower. But the thing in the churchyard is the Halton Cross.
The cross is Viking. Its shaft was carved around the early 900s with the legend of Sigurd the dragon-slayer: the smith Regin at his forge, the dragon Fafnir, Sigurd roasting the dragon's heart and burning his thumb, then beheading Regin. It is said to be the most complete telling of the tale outside Scandinavia. In 1635 the Reverend Richard Jackson removed the top and turned the lower half into a sundial. The dial plate reads, in translation, "the hours pass away and are reckoned to our account."
Before the Conquest the manor belonged to Earl Tostig, brother of King Harold. Domesday recorded it as Haltune, head of a lordship with twenty-two dependent townships, Lancaster among them. The Normans put a castle on the promontory above the river; Robert the Bruce's raid wrecked it in 1322 and nobody rebuilt it. The motte is still up on Castle Hill.
Lancaster station is three miles off and the Stagecoach 49 runs through. Halton had its own station once, across the river over a toll bridge, until 1966; the building is now where Lancaster University's rowing club stores its boats.
The neighbouring hamlet of Aughton holds a pudding festival once every twenty-one years. The 1992 pudding set a Guinness World Record. The next one is a way off yet.
