Lane End Inn

History

Behind the Lane End Inn at Hayton the stables still stand, built for six horses when this was a coaching inn on the main road between Newcastle and Carlisle. In the 1830s it came down in the world and became a jerry pub, the common name for the beerhouses that the Beer Act of 1830 let anyone open on a cheap excise licence, selling beer but no spirits. Mike Tuer's records have it starting as the Halfway House before 1841 and soon becoming the Lane Ends.

Its State Management story is unsettled, and it is a good way of seeing where the boundary ran. CAMRA record that when Carlisle's pubs were nationalised, the Lane End was the first free house you came to going east out of the city on the A69. But the scheme's own roll of 1920 includes an entry at number 92 reading Hayton Lane End, How Mill, which is this place described by its village and its railway station rather than by a pub name. Either the scheme took it after 1916 and CAMRA's line is about the moment of nationalisation, or the roll means somewhere else at the same road end. Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises, compiled from the scheme's own registers and the 1920 roll among other sources, does not include it.

Its later name adds a clue. Mike Tuer's records have it trading as the Board from 1952 to 1972. The Board was an old inn name, but it was also what everyone called the state's Central Control Board, and a pub that took the name in 1952 and dropped it in 1972, the year before the scheme was wound up, looks like one the state was running.

The Board Inn at Hayton Lane End, How Mill, turns up in the Carlisle Journal's country-taverns feature of 21 July 1961, billed as a free house under Mr A. Bird, with good parking and the telephone number Hayton 252. That puts the Board name inside Mike Tuer's span. It does not show who owned the house. The same page billed the Duke of Cumberland, the String of Horses and the Red Lion at Cumwhitton as free houses, all of them on the 1920 roll or in Historic England's gazetteer, while the Weary Sportsman at Castle Carrock was given only a licensee. Free house may simply have meant free of a brewery tie. So it is a possible scheme pub, not a confirmed one. CAMRA list the freehold today as Robinsons of Stockport.

Before it shut it was known for its open fire, free pool table and beer garden, the second pub in the village on this site alongside the Stone Inn, with decent food and well-kept beer by most accounts, though the interior was described as due some attention. Mike Tuer's records have it closing in 2013. It closed long term in November 2017 and was advertised for new tenants, and it has stayed shut.

In June 2024 Cumberland Council approved an application to take in part of the highway next to it, the old lay-by on the A69, as pub curtilage, and the Secretary of State gave notice of the stopping-up order to allow it; the council's report on that application describes it as a vacant building. A further planning application followed in August 2025, to extend the pub and add play areas and a car park, and early in 2026 Solway CAMRA reported that permission had been given for the renovations to reopen it as a pub.