The Wooden Walls

Gone

Last known as an inn in the 1880s

There now

A house, still called Wooden Walls

Address

Brisco, Carlisle

Where exactly

Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4193852010, in the Historic England list entry for Wooden Walls, the house the Post Office directory of 1880-81 calls the Wooden Walls Inn.

On the old road south of Carlisle through Brisco stands a whitewashed house called Wooden Walls, dated 1681 on its lintel with the initials T.N. and E.N., and listed Grade II. It was an inn for at least forty years of the nineteenth century, and its name is a ship's: 'the wooden walls of England' was the old name for the navy's oak-built men-of-war.

Mannix and Whellan's directory of 1847 has Jacob Tweddell as the victualler at Brisco at the sign of the Ship. By the Post Office directory of 1858 the same keeper's house is the Wooden Walls, so the sign changed but stayed at sea. The first Ordnance Survey map, surveyed about 1861, marks 'P.H.' on the long range on the south side of the road at the north-west end of the hamlet, with a draw well in front, a little way from Brisco Hall. That is where the listed house stands.

John Kitchen kept it in September 1879, when the county bench fined him £1 and put him on the black list, though his licence was renewed. The Post Office directory of 1880-81 still has the Wooden Walls Inn, and it is last known as an inn about 1884. Brisco's other pub, the Red Cat, a beerhouse towards Durdar, lasted until the Board closed it in 1917.

Photograph

Also lost in Brisco

• The Red Cat

Still serving, near where it stood

• The Nosey Cow Inn

  Harraby
  1.2 kmaway

• Upperby Social Club

  Upperby
  1.6 kmaway

• Border Gate Beefeater

  Carleton
  1.7 kmaway

• Creighton RFC

  Harraby
  2.1 kmaway