The Malt Shovel Inn is known for its pies. There is a cheese and onion pie that turns up on the specials board, and a chicken, ham and leek pie with a light crust and creamy filling, and the food is homemade and served from noon until half seven every day, with a full takeaway service if you would rather eat back at the cottage. It is a free house, run by a village family for the benefit of the village, which is not a phrase most pubs can use with a straight face. CAMRA describes the bar as "comfort without ostentation or trendiness." The regular ale is Wainwright Gold, with four changing beers alongside it, and there are inherited photographs on the walls that the same CAMRA entry says are worth close examination.
Further along Main Street is the George Washington, which locals still call the Bull, because it was the Black Bull before it took the name it carries now. It pre-dates 1825. There are cask ales — JW Lees Bitter, Manchester Pale Ale, a couple of rotating guests — and home-cooked evening meals Thursday to Saturday, Sunday lunch until six, four en-suite rooms upstairs, and a beer garden at the foot of the Crag.
The Crag is the point of Warton. It rises straight up behind the houses to 163 metres, the highest ground in the Arnside and Silverdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the paths climb through ancient woodland and limestone pavement to a hillfort and a beacon. The pavement is reckoned the finest example in Lancashire. Peregrines nest in the disused quarry, and pearl-bordered and high brown fritillaries breed on the grassland. From the top you can see north to the Cumbrian hills, east to the Pennines, and out across the sands of Morecambe Bay.
The village itself is a single line of houses along Main Street, with burgage plots still visible between the street and Back Lane — the leftovers of a Wednesday market granted in 1200, along with a gallows and an ordeal pit, in the reign of King John.
St Oswald's church has a 62-foot tower funded in the fifteenth century by Robert Washington, and carved into it are the Washington family arms: three stars and two bars, said to have shaped the design of the American flag. The Washingtons lived here from about 1300; Thomas Washington was vicar until 1823 and the last of them in the village. George Washington, seven generations along, never came. The stone arms were moved indoors in 1955 to stop them weathering away, and every 4 July the Stars and Stripes is flown from the tower, using a flag given by American soldiers who passed through in the war and reputed to have flown over the Capitol.
Domesday lists the place as Wartun, four carucates, held before the Conquest by Earl Tostig and partly waste by 1086. Carnforth, a mile and a half off with the station and the M6 nearby, grew faster on limestone and railways and overtook it in a few decades. Warton kept the Crag, and the fell race up it that the children run every sports day.
