The Highland Laddie

History

The village pub at Glasson, out towards the Solway on the line of Hadrian's Wall, eight miles north-west of the city. Family run, 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.

It is back from the dead. CAMRA recorded it closed on 7 June 2019, future uncertain, and it stayed shut through a handover to new owners in 2021. It was refurbished and reopened in 2025, and CAMRA surveyed it again in March 2026. It is registered as an Asset of Community Value.

What it was known for before it closed is worth keeping. 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.

It was a State Management pub, and the sell-off records settle what the 1920 roll left ambiguous. When the scheme was wound up the Highland Laddie at Glasson was sold as a tenanted house for £3,775, the lowest price on the entire disposal list, 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. That entry also confirms 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.