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Lost pub · Drumburgh

The Lowther Castle Inn

Gone 1917

Gone
Closed by the Board, 1917
There now
A house, Lowther House
Address
Drumburgh
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY2650759786, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The 25-inch map surveyed in 1864 marks the Lowther Castle (P.H.) here. The building's use in 2018: residential (Lowther House).

The village inn at Drumburgh, on the Solway on the line of Hadrian's Wall, a few yards along the road from the remains of Drumburgh Castle. Its sign was a compliment to the lord of the manor: the Earls of Lonsdale, whose seat was Lowther Castle, held the manor of Drumburgh, and land here was still held of the Earl by customary tenure in the 1840s. The Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map surveyed in 1864 marks the Lowther Castle (P.H.) on the south side of the village street.

It was already the place where the village met. In November 1819 the Drumburgh Annual Hunt cast off at seven in the morning, with dinner 'upon the Table precisely at Two in the Afternoon, at Joseph Wood's, the Lowther Castle Inn'. Benjamin Wood kept it in 1841, when an estate at Glasson was auctioned there, and the Woods of Easton still owned it in the 1860s and 1870s. When the Carlisle and Silloth Bay Railway was cut across Drumburgh Moss, the commoners were called to the inn in September 1855 to choose a committee to treat with the company for their lost rights, and in March 1857 the magistrates sat there, at Jeremiah Skelton's, to hear the Lawsons of Drumburgh Castle claim for damage to their crops.

It was more than an inn. Every letting notice offers it with a grocer's shop, farm buildings and about twenty acres of land, with the right to graze over the undivided common and to cut peats on the moss. In 1867 the Woods described it as 'in a district surrounded by Public Works', and in 1873 as in 'a thriving locality, surrounded by large and increasing Chemical and Manure Manufactories', an unexpected view of a Solway village. In 1886 the valuer regulating Drumburgh Common and Moss deposited his schedule of everyone's claims at the inn for the parish to inspect.

In 1891 its licence was moving from J. G. Milburn to Thomas Thwaites when the freehold came up for auction at the Caledonian Hotel in Carlisle: the inn, with yard, stables, byre and coach-house, a cottage 'for many years used as a Grocer's Shop', fifteen acres and a quarter, a customary close called Marsh Close, a stint and a quarter on Drumburgh Moss and two peat pots. It stood 'in the centre of the pleasant village of Drumburgh', a few minutes' walk from the station, the licence was 'one of very long standing', and it was let at £65 a year. In November 1898 the licence passed from William Jefferson to John Connell, formerly dairy farm manager to Mr Black of Hensingham Hall.

In August 1899 the coroner sat there on William Fox, a farmer from High Pow near Bolton, 45 and three times married, who had walked out on the marsh after Sunday dinner, stripped near Glasson Creek and gone into the tide though he could not swim. The jury asked for notice boards warning bathers at Raven Bank and Drumburgh jetty: what used to be level sand, the foreman said, was now a sudden drop, the channel having shifted all the way down from Rockcliffe. By 1901 it belonged to the Maryport Brewery, which advertised it to let with seventeen acres from Candlemas 1902. It was still licensed in July 1916, as the Lowther Castle, Drumburgh, and the Board closed it the next year. The building is a house now, Lowther House.

Photograph

Old Ordnance Survey plan of Drumburgh village, with a red circle round a building on the south side of the main street labelled Lowther Castle (P.H.), a red label reading Lowther Castle Inn, and the remains of Drumburgh Castle marked to its right
The Lowther Castle (P.H.) on Drumburgh's village street, with the castle beside it, on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map surveyed in 1864 National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0

Sources

Still serving, near where it stood

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