Plough Inn

History

Opened Late 17th or 18th century

Building

CAMRA date it to 1786

The Twelve Men

Meeting here since 1684, and still

Modernised

2004

A pub with a working village government in it, and it has had one since 1684. That year twelve wealthy landowners were appointed the Twelve Men of Wreay, guardians of the village, contributing to its upkeep and caring for the poor. By custom they met at the Plough each Candlemas, around 6 February, for their annual meeting, followed by a meal of oatcakes, bread, cheese and butter with ale, during which it was customary to smoke a long white clay churchwarden pipe.

And it hasn't stopped. The churchwarden pipe sits in a glass cabinet in the pub, inscribed with the names of the current twelve men in seat, and the village guardians still use the Plough as their meeting place. Three hundred and forty years of village governance, unbroken, in a pub you can walk into. The churchwarden pipes turn up at the Wheatsheaf too, in its manorial court dinners. Same ritual, different century.

Where the Twelve Men came from is less settled than 1684 suggests. A Cumberland News feature of 12 February 1988 said their origins are lost and they were probably self-appointed, though there is a record of them from before the union of the parliaments in 1707. The pub's age is loose too: its own marketing claims five centuries, while CAMRA soberly says 1786. Given the Twelve Men were meeting here from the late 1600s, late seventeenth or eighteenth century is the safe answer, and five centuries looks like enthusiastic rounding.

The village had a second, jokier government. At Shrovetide 1780 Charles Howard, the future 11th Duke of Norfolk and later MP for Carlisle, was staying at Woodside with his friends Mr and Mrs Losh. To liven the Shrove Tuesday sports he suggested they take off the sham worthies of Carlisle, and at the Plough he was elected Mayor, with two of the Loshes as swordbearer and recorder and a town crier going ahead. A new Mayor was elected every Shrove Tuesday for about a hundred years, and a hunt in time replaced the cockfighting. The last advertisement, for 10 February 1880, announced the Wreay Hunt at Mr Richardson's Plough Inn, with the Brampton Harriers casting off at 10 am, dinner at 3 and W. Lawson as Mayor.

The Loshes left a greater mark than that. Sarah Losh and her family are reputed to have come into the Plough to discuss matters with the Twelve Men, and to have been involved with her in building the village church and Wreay School. Losh (1786-1853) was a self-taught visionary architect, and her St Mary's Church at Wreay of 1842, Romanesque-Byzantine and covered in idiosyncratic natural carving, is now regarded as one of the singular works of English architecture. She was largely ignored in her own time. It is an architectural footnote that outshines most of this site.

How the scheme took the Plough is on record, in Sir Edgar Sanders' own notes of April and May 1917. The Irvings had it, and with beer restrictions cutting their supply to a third of 1916's and the summer tea trade their mainstay, Sanders offered 17s 6d a week plus commission on food and minerals. Mr Irving was 'very indignant' and would not hand over before his lease ran out, until he was told the Board could take control ten days after serving a statutory notice. The Irvings asked for 25s, and Sanders 'was not going to bargain'. A week later Irving took the 17s 6d. He was off to Bristol, and Mrs Irving stayed on as manager.

The scheme kept fiddling with it: altered in 1936-7, improved in 1963 and its public rooms reconstructed in 1966. That last job was its own showpiece of what happens to a country inn when it is modernised: the jubilee supplement that October describes the small smoke room and the bar knocked into one large room with a central counter. The sign then showed a farmer working an old plough drawn by two horses. It was offered for sale with the rest in 1972, and the Twelve Men sat through all of it.

The 1988 feature caught them at work. Membership was for life, that year's election filled a vacancy left by a death, and the Revd Paul Kybird chaired the meeting near Candlemas; absentees paid a traditional shilling fine. A new dining room opened that February on the very night of the meeting. Of the original 21-inch clay pipes only three survived, displayed by the landlord, Brian Henderson: at one time the late Bob Blamire's was thought to be the last, until Henderson found two more. He had bought a set of 13-inch ones six years earlier that few members tried to smoke.

The pub was modernised in 2004 with handmade brick and granite, the bar built from bricks rescued from an old Cumbrian mill race, an old ploughshare on the frontage and a piece of a combine harvester edging the bar: the name worn on its sleeve. Jane Kirby and Alex Foster took it on in May 2014, a family venture with Jane's son in the kitchen. It went into the Good Beer Guide for 2016 and was Solway CAMRA's winter Pub of the Season that year, and it is food-led now, with rooms, local casks from Carlisle, Great Corby and Hesket Newmarket, a beer garden, play area and firepit. Best Country Pub 2017, and its Sunday lunch was voted a top five in Cumbria in late 2025.