Hornby

Railway relic and village pub

Somewhere in the village there is a keystone carved with a cat holding a rat. It was moved here from a railway bridge that no longer exists, and it carries the initials PD for Pudsey Dawson, who had something to do with a railway line that also no longer exists. The cat has outlasted both.

The Royal Oak is the pub most people mean when they say the pub. Helena and Gary reopened it in November 2022 after a refurbishment, and the room is clean and newly done and the beers are local. The specials do most of the work: a Monday £8 Menu, a Thursday Pensioner's Two-Course Lunch, and a Sunday Roast Beef Special that one TripAdvisor reviewer summarised as "Cracking Sunday Roast!" There is a quiz on Wednesdays at half past nine. Reviewers across two sites settle at around 4.6 or 4.7 out of five, which for a village of 468 people is a lot of reviewers.

Coaching inn and cakes

The Castle Inn is the older option, a Georgian coaching inn with a bistro and six B&B rooms done out with super-king beds and Egyptian cotton. The bar menu is sandwiches and small plates — smoked salmon and cream cheese with chives, Lancashire crumbly cheese with red onion marmalade, the Castle Inn Club with bacon, chicken, lettuce, tomato and egg, all under seven pounds. Breakfasts use local produce and home-baked things. An inn has stood on the site since the late sixteenth century, when it was occupied by Henry Chapburn, deputy bailiff for the castle estate.

For cake there is Hornby Tea Rooms and Post Office at 8–10 Main Street, a tearoom, gift shop and post office that runs a genuine open fire and homemade cakes, open mornings into the afternoon most weekdays.

Rivers and the Tudor tower

The village sits where the River Wenning meets the River Lune, with Hornby Castle on the cliff above. St Margaret's church has the thing everyone comes to see: an octagonal Tudor tower whose two stages are set half a turn out of line with each other. Sir Edward Stanley, Lord Monteagle, built it in thanks for getting home safely from the Battle of Flodden in 1513. Inside are two Anglo-Saxon cross fragments, one carved more than a thousand years ago showing the Loaves and Fishes.

Walks, bridge and Norman earthworks

Walking is the main event. The Lune Valley Ramble follows the river, and a 6.1-mile circular links Hornby and Wray via Loyn Bridge — three sandstone arches with triangular cutwaters, thought to date to 1684 — past hedgerows of blackthorn and dog rose, with dippers and sand martins on the banks. Above the bridge is Castle Stede, the best-preserved Norman motte-and-bailey in a valley that has the highest concentration of them in England. Roger de Montbegon built it around 1086. He later became one of the twenty-five barons who stood surety for Magna Carta.

Wray and scarecrows

Wray is about a mile and a half along the Wenning. It holds the country's longest-running scarecrow festival every spring, which is the sort of thing you find out about by walking there and then walking back and telling people.