CarlislePubs 🛍️ Lost pubs shopShop: T-shirts, hoodies, mugs & a jigsaw

Lost pub · Walton

The Centurion Inn

Gone 2010

Gone
Closed 1 October 2010
There now
A house, after a planning fight the owner lost
Address
Walton, Brampton CA8 2DH
Where exactly
Beside Milecastle 56 on Hadrian's Wall, which its record places by reference to the former inn.

The village pub at Walton, on Hadrian's Wall, and the only one the village had. Its records go back to 1781. Its other distinction is archaeological. Milecastle 56 is thought to lie just north-east of the inn, the line of the Wall runs under the village, and Historic England define one of the scheduled stretches of the World Heritage Site as running between the road to Garthside and the Centurion Inn, Walton. A closed pub used as the boundary marker of a Roman frontier.

It closed as a pub on 1 October 2010, and by Mike Tuer's account it ran for a short time afterwards as a licensed café; as a pub it never came back, though not for want of official effort. What happened next is unusual enough to be worth the space. The owner moved into it and lived there for about three years without permission, and Carlisle City Council served an enforcement notice giving him six months to reopen the place as a public house and to use the flat upstairs only in connection with running it. He appealed. The Planning Inspectorate dismissed the appeal, the planners' case being that a change of use would mean the loss of the only pub in the village. With Solway CAMRA's help it was registered as an Asset of Community Value by early 2016.

By then the premises licence had already been cancelled, four years after the last pint. A fresh premises licence was granted on 22 June 2018, but nothing records the pub trading under it, and CAMRA still had it closed when they last updated their entry in 2024. The council suspended that licence in September 2022 for non-payment of the annual fee, and it stays on the register, suspended. Walkers on the Wall path kept turning up and finding it shut; the Trailblazer guide was still printing updates saying so years later. The village is not dry: the Old Vicarage brews and pours a few hundred yards away.

Sources 9

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs