The Fleece at Ruleholme

History

Most old inns get converted. The Golden Fleece at Ruleholme, near Irthington, was knocked down and rebuilt from the ground, and the Fleece that stands there now opened in 2021. The hamlet is older than any of it: Ruleholme stands on the old Military Road, bypassed when the A689 was re-routed in the 1970s, and Ruleholme Bridge of 1753 and an eighteenth-century milestone are still there on the old line.

The old inn was a State Management house; the scheme's roll of 1920 lists the Golden Fleece, Ruleholme, at number 88. It was taking guests by 1961, when the Carlisle Journal of 21 July carried its advertisement, with Mr N. Lodge as licensee, board residence, bed and breakfast, musical entertainment, a large car park and the telephone number Brampton 416. In 1988 the North Cumbrian accordion and fiddle club met there on a Wednesday each month.

Robert and Sylvia Cowan ran it from 2011, and it closed in October 2018. A planning application went in the following month, Carlisle City Council approved it, and the old inn was demolished rather than converted: the owners said they had looked at every renovation option and concluded a total rebuild was the better one. Ashwood Design Associates designed the replacement. The same partnership took on the lease of the Queen at Great Corby while the rebuild was under way, and ran it until 2024.

What went up, through the pandemic and over roughly two years, was a multi-million-pound job: 2,180 square metres of floorspace, a veranda on two sides, parking for eighty-one, and bedrooms expanded by fourteen to twenty-three, with stone walls, winched-in oak beams and a natural slate roof. The opening slipped from June to late September 2021. The published plans also included a microbrewery, and whether that was ever built is not clear from anything since.

It is a country inn with rooms now, with a bar, three dining areas, a function room and a well-regarded kitchen. It sits in the eastern Wall country with the Sally and the Stag, and works as a base for people walking Hadrian's Wall.