Metal Bridge Inn

History

Named after

Thomas Telford's cast-iron Esk bridge, c.1815-23

The bridge

Three cast-iron spans, the longest 45.7 metres

Bridge closed

1911, corroded; remains removed 1970

The pub is named after a bridge that isn't there any more. Thomas Telford built a cast-iron bridge across the Esk here around 1815-23, as part of his Glasgow to Carlisle road, with three cast-iron spans, the longest of them 45.7 metres, and the settlement, the plantation and the inn all took their name from it.

The inn began as the Kings Arms, around 1822, and took the bridge's name later. Mike Tuer's records put the renaming after a bridge built around 1847, which does not square with Telford's spans of 1815-23, so when the sign changed is not settled. Historic England's gazetteer dates the present building to the mid-nineteenth century.

Telford's bridge was found badly corroded in 1911, closed, and replaced with a ferro-concrete one. Both that and the remains of Telford's abutments went in 1970 for the A74. One of his iron castings is preserved at Tullie House; otherwise the inn is the last thing carrying the name. With Thomas Brassey at the Scott & Brassey and Thomas Bouch, born at the Ship Inn at Thursby, that gives this site three great engineers of the canal and railway age.

The state got here early. It was one of only two Cumberland Ward houses the Board already had by the summer of 1916: when the Cumberland News printed the Cumberland Ward's sixty-eight licensed houses on 8 July 1916, it noted that the Bridge Inn, Metal Bridge, and the Highland Laddie at Todhills 'have already been taken over by the Liquor Control Board in connection with the Gretna area'. The scheme's 1920 roll lists it as the Metal Bridge Inn, Castletown, near Rockcliffe, number 248.

Yet the scheme never quite owned it. By 1957 the building was leased from the Castletown Estate and run by a tenant, with the scheme holding only the licence. H. B. Wilson's official history counts it among the best of the scheme's last improvements: just off the M6, a few hundred yards from the Scottish border, with restaurant facilities of a high standard. It was offered for sale with the rest in 1972.

Later it sat derelict for years, reviewers reckon as long as twenty-five, before being restored and reopened, which puts it with the Horse & Farrier and the Stag in the rescued column. There are glamping pods overlooking the river now, alongside the rooms. It's hidden in plain sight: the road it sits on runs parallel to the motorway and can only be reached from Gretna to the north or Carlisle to the south.