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Lost pub · Carleton

The Golden Fleece

Gone 1917

Gone
Closed 1917
There now
A house, Golden Fleece House
Address
Carleton
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4386051624, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: residential (Golden Fleece House).

Carleton's third pub stood out on the Penrith road at Quarry Gate, beyond the village towards Wragmire Hill, on the corner of the lane down to Quarry Gate; the Ordnance Survey letters it 'Golden Fleece (P.H.)' on its 25-inch maps of 1860-63 and 1899. The building survives as Golden Fleece House. Travellers knew it as a landmark. In October 1816 three footpads dragged a linen traveller off his horse 'between Causeway-house and the Golden Fleece' on his way in from Penrith and robbed him of more than £100 in notes; the Harraby Hill house had stopped being a Golden Fleece by then, so this was very probably the Carleton one.

Parson and White's directory of 1829 lists Margaret Fisher as victualler of the Golden Fleece at Quarry Gates, and Mary Fisher kept it in 1848, when it served the business of the country round it. The commissioner dividing Wragmire Moss, the common between Carleton, Cumwhinton and Cotehill, took the claims there that June and settled them there in October; a greyhound match was made over a drink there that March; and a nineteen-acre allotment of the enclosed moss was auctioned there in November 1854.

Carts stopped at its door. In April 1860 the Hesket carrier was fined 2s 6d after a constable met his two horses and carts plodding on alone, 200 yards past the inn, while he was inside with a glass of warm ale. In April 1865 the Second Cumberland Artillery Volunteers marched out from Carlisle to a field near the Golden Fleece, fired 24 rounds and were entertained with bread and cheese and beer, 'and it is needless to add the men were not asked twice to fall in', by 'the worthy hostess'.

In 1873 the freehold was sold at Penrith with its garden, barn and stable, two fields beside it and a close called Whinny Hill over the parish boundary in Wetheral, about fifteen acres in all, with John Coulthard as tenant. Sarah Coulthard had it by 1879, when she was fined a nominal 1s for gambling: she had lost two cattle, and to make it up to her a neighbouring farmer put up his old silver watch to be played for at dominoes, at a small entrance fee. In February 1880 the licence passed from her to Joseph Henderson.

Out on the edge of the town, it took the inquests. In 1885 a surgeon who was a patient at the Garlands asylum was found drowned in a deep pond, an old quarry, in Thwaite's Wood on Newlands farm. In March 1886 William Bell, known as 'Farmer', was found dead on the flags beneath the inn's hayloft, 'so firmly frozen to the flags that before it could be removed, the place had to be thawed with warm water'. In 1888 a stranger was found dead beside the same quarry pond, 'about half way between Carleton and the Golden Fleece public-house'.

In February 1887 its licence passed from Joseph Henderson to M. W. Garnett, until then of the White Quey at Stoneraise, and the Garnetts kept it to the end: William Garnett in 1894, 1897 and 1906, and Mrs Elizabeth Garnett in 1910 and 1914. There was pigeon shooting from traps beside it in the 1880s and 1890s, and in January 1891 the volunteer cyclists of Carlisle met those from Brampton there before a moonlit ride to Low Hesket. One of the city's water schemes of 1897 put a new reservoir on the London Road 'between the Golden Fleece Inn and Wragmire Hill'.

It was still open in July 1916, listed with Carleton's Blue Bell among the Ward houses the Board was to buy, and that summer three boys were fined for smashing telegraph insulators 'between Carleton Hill and the Golden Fleece'. The scheme took it in 1917 and closed it, one of the houses the Board judged surplus in its first years, though one list ends it in 1914. Not to be confused with the city's other Golden Fleeces, on Corporation Road, on St Nicholas Street (which became the South End Constitutional Club), at Willowholme and at Harraby.

Photograph

Old Ordnance Survey map of a crossroads on the main road lettered Roman Road, with a small building on one corner circled in red, the words Golden Fleece P.H. beside it, Quarry Gate to the south-west, and a red label reading Golden Fleece
The Golden Fleece at Quarry Gate, Carleton, on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map revised in 1899, in William Garnett's time, at the crossroads on the Penrith road National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0
Old Ordnance Survey map of open fields with the main road and a lane crossing, a small building at the crossing circled in red with the words Golden Fleece P.H. beside it, Quarry Gate lettered below, and a red label reading Golden Fleece
The same crossroads on the first 25-inch map, surveyed between 1860 and 1863, with Quarry Gate along the lane National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0

Sources 25

Also lost in Carleton

Still serving, near where it stood

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