The Rose & Crown

Gone

Closed after flooding; closed long term since January 2021

There now

Boarded up, not for sale, as of 2026

Address

Low Hesket, Carlisle

Where exactly

Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4650846424, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: public house (Rose and Crown).

A roadside inn on the old Great North Road between Penrith and Carlisle, now the A6, in the village the older papers also call Nether Hesket. It was trading before 1829, and new or newly rebuilt in March 1831, when its owner, Joseph Robson of Barrock Gill, offered it to let: 'Two Stories High, lately Built, and in good Repair, with Stables and other Out-offices, and One Acre and a Half of rich Arable Land adjoining', a house that 'commands a good run of business, and might be considerably increased through an industrious tenant'.

In 1837 Robson tried to sell it, with its gig-house, orchard, garden and field and three cottages next door. The tenant was John Beaumont, and the ground was copyhold, held under the Duke of Devonshire for 2s a year. The Duke's interest outlived the century: in 1919 the Central Control Board listed the Rose & Crown at Low Hesket among the houses in which he still held manorial rights. Mr Grisdale held his dancing pupils' ball at 'the Rose and Crown Inn, Hesket', very probably this one, in March 1841, and Robson, by then of Etterby Lodge, still owned it in 1861, when he offered it to let again from Martinmas.

Abraham Barker kept it in 1865, when a house and cottages in the village were sold there, and R. Hope in 1878, when he offered £3 to be shot for at pigeons. Isaac and Jane Armstrong had it by 1893, when their baby daughter died at the inn aged sixteen days; Rachel Armstrong had it in 1909, when a farm labourer from Skelton Pasture was charged with taking 4s from the bar. In December 1894 a tramp came in with a rug stolen from the Causeway House Inn and tried to sell it, asking £3 10s and coming down to 9s, without a taker.

In January 1897 the inquest was held at the 'Rose and Crown Hotel' on John Edgar, eight, who had run beside a traction engine pulling two empty furniture vans through the village and gone under the wheels. 'The engine has gone over my belly. I shall die,' he told the woman who carried him in. The driver said he had been doing three miles an hour and was 'not in the village at that time'; the verdict was accidental death. By 1907 the house belonged to a brewery and was to let from Whitsuntide, 'fully licensed, with Stable, Outbuildings, good Garden, and small Field', through the manager of the High Brewery in Carlisle.

It was an Iredale's house when the state arrived. It is number 115 on the scheme's roll of 1920, and The Carlisle Kid, writing about the neighbouring Salutation at High Hesket, records that the scheme nationalised the Rose & Crown at Low Hesket; it passed to the scheme in 1917, or in August 1916 by Historic England's gazetteer, which adds that it was altered in 1934-5 and let to a tenant in the late 1960s. The scheme's report said it had been turned from 'an ill-planned group of old buildings' into a roadside inn that could serve meals. It was sold to its tenant in 1973 for £8,750. Its sign was shown at the Inn Signs Exhibition at the Building Centre in London in 1936, alongside a dozen of Ernest Dinkel's.

Three years after the sale it was the new Carlisle CAMRA branch's Pub of the Month for September 1976, with Marston's Mild, Burton Bitter and Pedigree on, and that year's Good Beer Guide called it the nearest thing to the perfect pub. The branch's own verdict on the decor was a cross between the underside of the Kon-Tiki and the Jungle Hut. In its later years it served meals and had a travel and transport theme: bar seating taken from vintage coaches, transport pictures on the walls and a model railway running round the restaurant, with a heated patio outside.

It closed after it was flooded, and CAMRA have listed it as closed long term since January 2021; their record, last updated in June 2026, has it boarded up, not for sale, with no change of use applied for. The Old Cumbria Gazetteer lists Rose and Crown, Low Hesket as a place in Hesket parish. The two Heskets sit a mile apart on the A6. The scheme's other Rose & Crowns were at Upperby and Kirkbampton.

Sold in 1973 as the Rose and Crown, a tenanted house, for £8,750. Who bought the rest

Photograph

Still serving, near where it stood

• Plough Inn

  Wreay
  3.8 kmaway

• The Greyhound Inn

  Cotehill
  3.8 kmaway

• Fox & Pheasant Inn

  Armathwaite
  4.4 kmaway

• Crown Inn

  Ivegill
  5.6 kmaway