The Ship Hotel still has the old village pump standing in its yard. Inside, the main bar keeps a shuttered servery, and somewhere in the pub there is said to be a collection of birds' eggs left by Thomas Jackson, who held the licence from 1874 to 1922 and collected eggs on the side. It's a Thwaites house now, serving the house real ales and food that recent visitors have called the best they've had in a long time. The menu runs to a "Bird and Beast" burger, chicken parma, beef and onion pie, a ploughman's the pub describes as enough for two, and Sunday roasts. There's a bowling green out the back, reformed in 1984.
The pub began as two 18th-century cottages, two storeys tall, raised to three in 1905. In Victorian times it was where the village held its wedding receptions, funeral teas and dances. The Macluskie family ran it for more than sixty years from around 1930, and "Ma McCluskie" served Army and RAF men from camps within a fifty-mile radius during the war. An upstairs function room is named after her.
Overton sits on the Lune peninsula, north of the river's mouth, ringed by tidal saltmarsh that floods twice a day. Lancaster station is three and a half miles up the road, and Stagecoach service 5 links the village to Morecambe and Heysham. The Globe Hotel, which once drew charabancs of weekend holidaymakers to its putting greens and pleasure gardens, closed and now stands derelict. In its garden is the grave of Rover, a black-and-white spaniel who carried a collection box on his back all his life and gathered over £3,000 for charity; a memorial stone stands just inside the gate.
For shops there's a grocery in the Square and a Post Office and gift shop on Palings Road, with the village noticeboard and a footpath map beside it.
The footpath you want is the causeway to Sunderland Point, about a mile and a half across the marsh on a single-track road that floods at every high tide. Sunderland Point is the only community on the British mainland you can only reach when the tide is out. The walk is level, passing a bird hide, a camera obscura and Sambo's Grave. If you want more, a five-mile circuit carries on north along the coast and loops back around Bazil Point, with wide views across the Lune estuary to Glasson Dock.
St Helen's Church claims to be the oldest church building in Lancashire. The west wall is almost certainly Saxon, thicker than any known Norman wall. The plan is T-shaped, built so the whole congregation could see and hear an 18th-century pulpit set in the middle, and that pulpit still has its sounding board. The list of vicars begins in 1215 with a man recorded simply as Roger, surnames not yet being in use.
The Great Fire of 1618 took many of the village's wooden houses, and Main Street was rebuilt in stone in the early 1700s; the date stones are still there, 1739 and 1741. Ninety per cent of the parish was built from two local quarries, worked by skilled local stonemasons; the monks of Cockersand Abbey quarried stone here too.
The parish holds a Rose Queen in the first week of July, opened each year by a past queen.
