The Duke Of Cumberland

History

Named after

Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, 1721-1765

Reopened

2009, after a period of closure

Note

The last pub in Castle Carrock

A loaded name for this part of the world. Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, was the younger son of George II and the commander who crushed the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746; his suppression of the Highlands afterwards earned him the name Butcher Cumberland. His forces came through this country chasing the retreating Jacobite army. Carlisle Castle had been taken by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 and was retaken that winter.

So a Duke of Cumberland pub sits in the fell country the rising swept across, commemorating the man who ended it. It's the Hanoverian counterpoint to the Crown & Mitre, whose site held a coffee house whose landlords are said to have sheltered Jacobites: two pubs, two sides of 1745. The name works twice over, Cumberland also being the county. It was not always the name here, though. By Mike Tuer's records the pub was the Duke's Head until 1847, a century after Culloden.

Castle Carrock is out past Brampton at the foot of the northern Pennines, and the village has a closer tie to the city than its pub name. Castle Carrock reservoir, a couple of minutes up the road, was built in 1907 to supply Carlisle with drinking water, so the town has been drinking from Castle Carrock for well over a century, whichever pub it was in.

The State Management Scheme reached further into the hills than it is usually imagined to have gone: its roll of 1920 lists the Duke of Cumberland, Castle Carrock, at number 84. By 1961 it was advertising in the Carlisle Journal of 21 July as a free house under R. C. and M. L. Atkinson, selling Flowers Keg Bitter, telephone Hayton 641. Castle Carrock still had a second pub then. The Weary Sportsman stood on the other side of Geltsdale Road, advertising on the same page with Mr E. Duers as licensee and bed and breakfast on offer, and is now a lost pub.

The Duke is the only pub left in Castle Carrock, another last-one-standing, like the Milbourne in Denton Holme. Brampton, the nearest town, shows the wider thinning: dozens of pubs once and a handful now, the story told on the Nags Head's page. It reopened after a spell shut, in 2009, or 2007 by Mike Tuer's records, and has re-established itself since; Martin Brown held the licence for its first years back, until 2016. It is independent, the freehold in private hands.

Real fire, real ales, home-cooked bar food with European and Asian daily specials on a blackboard. Fourteen rooms, twins and doubles, by CAMRA's record, and a holiday cottage in Brampton. The village runs an annual music festival, Music on the Marr.