The Graham's Arms

Built

Probably 1793, the same date as the turnpike road outside

Gone

Stopped being a pub between 1972 and 1974

There now

Lyne Bank Guest House

Address

Lyne Bank, Westlinton

Where exactly

The listed building, now Lyne Bank.

Not the Graham Arms at Longtown, and the difference matters. This was a second pub of almost the same name, four miles south at Westlinton on the Lyne. It exists because of a road. It is Grade II listed as Lyne Bank and outbuildings, list entry 1335592, listed on 16 January 1984, and the entry opens with the useful words: house, formerly public house called the Graham Arms.

The listing dates it early nineteenth century or, more likely, the same year as the turnpike that runs past it: 1793. A milestone of the same probable date stands a few hundred yards away in the same parish and is listed too. So this was a purpose-built roadside inn, put up with the turnpike to catch the traffic on it, in a parish of eight listed buildings that are otherwise farmhouses, a bridge and a church.

Painted brick on a chamfered stone plinth with raised quoins, a hipped graduated slate roof, two storeys and three bays with a lower single-bay extension to the right. Behind it, an adjoining brick stable block on an L-shaped plan with a tiled roof. The Longtown Graham Arms has L-shaped stables behind it too, which is what a coaching inn looked like whichever road it stood on. Parson and White's directory of 1829 lists Edward Graham at the Graham's Arms, Westlinton.

In July 1916 it appears as the Graham Arms, Westlinton, on the Cumberland News's list of the twenty-four licensed houses in the Longtown division, and it is the one the State Management Scheme certainly took: acquired on 1 October 1916, and still shown as the Graham's Arms on the Ordnance Survey map of 1972. By 1974 the same building is marked Lyne Bank House. Somewhere in those two years it stopped being a pub and nobody has recorded when or why. It trades as the Lyne Bank Guest House now, so the building still takes travellers off the same road, two hundred and thirty years on.

It was not the only other one. The Graham Arms west of Gelt Bridge at Hayton, dated 1771 on its door lintel, closed about 1974 as well, and a district directory records three more: at Middle Cliff in Kirklinton, at Gretna Station in Kirkandrews-on-Esk, and at 23 High Cross Street in Brampton. Six pubs of one name in one district, all for the Grahams who held this ground either side of the border, and two of them stopped being pubs within a couple of years of each other.

Location from historicengland.org.uk. The pin marks the site.

Still serving, near where it stood

• Metal Bridge Inn

  Metal Bridge
  3.8 kmaway

• Graham Arms Inn

  Longtown
  4.3 kmaway

• Longtown Social Club

  Longtown
  4.4 kmaway

• The Tavern

  Longtown
  4.4 kmaway