The Pheasant Inn

History

In the Carlisle Journal of 21 July 1961 the Red Lion at Cumwhitton advertised itself as "Cumberland's Friendliest Wee Pub". It has been the Pheasant since 1995, by Mike Tuer's records, and it is a village inn at the south end of Cumwhitton, out in the Eden valley beyond Great Corby, with a reputation for food and local real ale that goes back a long way in the reviews.

How old it is depends on the account. CAMRA's is that the building began as a farm cottage with a pub added onto it around 1810, extended and altered repeatedly since; the pub's own description calls it a seventeenth-century inn with parts over three hundred years old. The two are not quite compatible, and CAMRA's is the one with a surveyor behind it. Solway CAMRA's magazine put the two together in 2016: an inn of 1810 with a seventeenth-century farm cottage built into it, which would account for both. The village had a second pub for a while, the Coach & Horses, from about 1822 to 1861.

It was a State Management pub, and one of the earliest country houses the state took. The Carlisle Kid, who has documented the scheme's pubs on Geograph, records it as state owned from 25 August 1916 until 1973, and Historic England's gazetteer confirms it: the Red Lion Hotel at Cumwhitton, the lease acquired in August 1916. It is missing from the commonly circulated lists, which lean heavily towards the city pubs, and the scheme's 1920 roll lists a Red Lion at "Cumwhinton", which this house very probably is, a letter out; the Lowther Arms page sets out why.

It was open and in use in the summer of 1919: the Cumberland News of 7 June advertised an auction "in the Red Lion Inn, Cumwhitton" on Monday 23 June at 6 in the evening, when Robert Dalton & Son offered a shop and dwelling house in the centre of the village. The 1961 advertisement billed it as a free house, fully licensed, with good parking and the telephone number Cumwhitton 202. Free house sits oddly beside state ownership to 1973, but a state house was free of any brewery's tie, which may be all the phrase meant.

Sara and Norman Drogomirecki and Chris Marshall had it when Solway CAMRA made it summer Pub of the Season in 2016, by which time it had twice been the branch's Pub of the Year and held a beer festival each May. Today there is a bar, a games room and a dining room, stone flagged floors and a fire going in winter, rooms upstairs, a charity quiz on third Thursdays, a book club, live music, wine tastings, and its own beer and music festival every August, the White Dog Festival.

It is worth keeping distinct from the Pheasant Inn on Church Street in Caldewgate, which was certainly a scheme pub and closed in 2000. Two Pheasants; this is the one still serving.