Fox & Pheasant Inn

History

Opened 17th century, by CAMRA

Building

A coaching inn, 17th century by CAMRA

Maybe once

The Red Lion, on the old Ordnance Survey maps

Owner

Robinsons; refitted December 2025

Setting

The Eden Valley, on the Settle-Carlisle line

A beamed riverside coaching inn deep in the Eden gorge, and the southernmost pub on this site. CAMRA call it a seventeenth-century coaching inn, and another account says the 1800s. The old stables alongside have been turned into the main bar and dining room with the stalls still showing, and the main bar has a flagstone floor and an inglenook. That puts it with the Near Boot, the Graham Arms and the Crown at Wetheral among the genuine coaching stops.

It may not always have been the Fox & Pheasant. The Ordnance Survey's county maps, surveyed between the 1860s and the 1940s, mark an inn on this spot as the Red Lion.

The State Management Scheme did reach Armathwaite: its 1920 roll has the Sportsman at Aiket Gate as number 250. The Fox & Pheasant, or the Red Lion, is not on it, so it stayed a private house while the state ran its neighbour.

Armathwaite sits on the Settle-Carlisle railway, and the station is a few hundred metres away, which extends the railway thread on this site beyond the city's own lines at the Caledonian and the Scott & Brassey to the great scenic route through the fells. The inn is a popular base for people walking the Settle to Carlisle trail, and the Eden here is one of England's finest salmon and trout rivers, so it draws anglers too.

Robinsons of Stockport own the freehold. A company set up in March 2017 ran it for a spell, and the brewery refitted it at the end of 2025, reopening it in late December in time for Christmas. The bar was moved forward, carpet gave way to timber, the beams were restored and the stonework was sandblasted back to the warm red of the local Permian sandstone. The old stone bar floor stayed, and so did the two open fires and three log burners.

Rooms upstairs, a Sunday carvery, and a steak and ale pie people come back for. It is registered as an Asset of Community Value.