The Highland Laddie

History

When the State Management Scheme was wound up, the cheapest pub on its whole disposal list was the Highland Laddie at Glasson: sold as a tenanted house for £3,775, cheaper than any of the managed houses and a fraction of the £220,000 paid for the Central Hotel. A small pub a long way out, valued accordingly. It is the village pub at Glasson, out towards the Solway on the line of Hadrian's Wall, eight miles north-west of the city.

For six years, 1841 to 1847, it was the Highlander. Historic England's gazetteer has the Board taking it over in 1917 and the scheme letting it to a tenant in the late 1960s, and the sell-off entry settles what the 1920 roll left ambiguous: it is the Highland Laddie the roll placed at Burgh by Sands, since Glasson sits in the old Barony of Burgh.

Glasson has other reasons to detain you. The Carlisle Navigation Canal of 1821 ran just east of the village on its way to Port Carlisle, the Port Carlisle Railway filled it in and took its line in 1854, and the overbridge of 1819-23 built to carry the road over the canal is still there and listed.

What the pub was known for before it closed is worth keeping. In 2013 it was one of only two pubs in north Cumbria with a mild on permanently. It was the pub in these parts that opened all day for people walking the Wall path, and it was where the haaf net fishermen met: haaf netting is the Solway's own method, waded out into the tide with a framed net, and the licensee had a name for cooking what came out of the firth, sea trout, sea bass and salmon.

Then it nearly went. CAMRA recorded it closed on 7 June 2019, future uncertain, and it stayed shut through a handover to new owners in 2021. In 2024 it was bought by the owners of the Kings Arms at Bowness-on-Solway, and it was refurbished and reopened in 2025 with Carlisle Brewing's beers on; CAMRA surveyed it again in March 2026. It is registered as an Asset of Community Value. Family run now: home cooking, Sunday roasts with booking advised, a pensioners' lunch midweek, Saturday breakfasts from nine, and a family quiz on Thursdays at half seven for a fiver a team.