Dalston Hall Golf Club

History

The bar at Dalston Hall golf club is in the old stables of a house with a pele tower of about 1498, dated by the four carved shields of the Kirkbride and Dalston arms on the south face of its battlements. It is the standard Border form: three storeys, one room to a floor, walls of enormous thickness, a barrel-vaulted ground floor that is now the library, a stone newel stair running the full height to a roof built as a fighting deck, and an iron yett still hanging at the inner door, one of very few left anywhere. Dalston Hall has been Grade II* listed since September 1984.

An inscription below the parapet reads JOHN DALLSTON ELSABET MI WYF MAD YS BYLDYNG. A hall was added about 1556, a central block about 1620, and alterations followed in the late seventeenth century. In 1645, during the siege of Carlisle, Sir George Dalston had to leave: General David Leslie took the place as Covenanter headquarters.

In 1761 it was bought by Monkhouse Davison, a London grocer, who held it for thirty-two years. In 1897 it went to Edmund Wright Stead of Stead McAlpin, the Cummersdale calico printers, who had C.J. Ferguson extend and remodel it: the work is dated 1899 on the lead rainwater heads, and Ferguson did the sixteenth-century wing over in Arts and Crafts style, with a banqueting hall inglenook whose pewter firehood is dated 1900 and initialled E.W.S. One ground-floor fireplace has William de Morgan tiles. It was later a youth training centre, and has been a country house hotel since 1971.

The golf course is modern, laid out in the grounds in the early 1990s: nine holes of parkland, alongside an adults-only holiday park of thirty-odd serviced seasonal pitches, statics and lodges, across ninety or a hundred acres depending on who is counting. Guests get the golf and the fly fishing on the Caldew thrown in, and there is a riverside footpath and cycleway off the site. The clubhouse bar is open to all visitors rather than to members only: draught beer and lager, bottles, breakfast and bar meals served until half seven, and in practice a weekend operation.

The hotel is a separate business from the golf club and the caravan park, though the park surrounds it on three sides. In 2025 it applied for listed building consent to knock the dining room through into the staff accommodation and the old office, making a larger dining room and a new bar, and to take down the marquee that had stood in the grounds for over a decade on what was meant to be temporary permission. Officers recommended approval: less than substantial harm, outweighed by keeping the hall economically viable. The hall's own lounge bar, with a pool table, local beers and ciders, and evening bites, is part of the hotel; nothing published says whether someone who is neither staying nor at a function can walk into that one.