Crown Inn

History

Scheme

Not on the 1920 roll; the Elephant at Itonfield was

Parish

Ivegill, made a parish in 1867

A remote crossroads pub at Broadfield, south of the city, on the road out towards Southwaite. This is the Ivegill Crown Inn; the other is Redfern's 1937 model pub on Scotland Road at Stanwix. Completely different stories, same name, and that makes eight Crowns on this site altogether: two Crown Inns, two Crown & Thistles, the Crown Hotel at Wetheral, the Crown & Mitre, Crown Lane Cellar, and the Crown on Botchergate, which is closed. It's the workhorse of English pub names, and Cumberland is no exception.

Ivegill takes its name from the River Ive, which runs through the village under Wharton Bridge, a listed packhorse bridge. It was carved out of Dalston as a parish of its own in 1867, when its Gothic church was built, in what had been Inglewood Forest. The Crown stands away from the village, and no build date is recorded for it, but Mike Tuer's records have it at Broadfield from before 1828. The original part of the building is the cosy end, with the real fire.

The roads around it had other inns. A Greyhound Inn, now Beck House Farm, stood a mile to the east on the Burthwaite to Calthwaite road and closed in the 1860s, and the Elephant Inn was further along the same road, north of Calthwaite. On the Ivegill road towards Hutton Road End was the Marketgate Inn, which closed in 1996.

The Crown is a scheme pub, taken on later than most. Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises has it acquired and converted in 1918 and sold in 1972-3, and the sell-off list recorded it as a managed house valued at £4,570. Oddly it is not on the scheme's roll of 1920, though the Elephant at Itonfield in the same parish is, at number 85; the roll is a transcription and has gaps.

It is a destination you drive to rather than a walk-in local, and evenings only: home-made British food, burgers with daft names, and a refurbished interior. It is registered as an Asset of Community Value.