The Stone Inn

History

Building

Early 19th century, hammer-dressed red sandstone

Listed

Grade II, 28 March 1984

Renamed

The Stone Inn, end of the 1970s

Same family since

1983

Hayton's pub has had three names, and it got the last one because of the darts team. At the end of the 1970s the darts players kept getting confused with another White Lion over in Brampton, so the White Lion at Hayton became the Stone Inn; Mike Tuer's records put the change in 1980. That other White Lion can be named now. It stood on High Cross Street, was the White Lion as early as 1790, closed as a pub in 2014, and is a doctors' surgery today. A pub renamed to stop its darts players turning up at the wrong venue, and the wrong venue is gone.

Its early history is sparse. The pub's own account says it may originally have been the Salutation Inn, probably built not long after the village school and the rebuild of St Mary Magdalene, which went up by subscription in 1780, which would give it a former name in common with the Sally a few miles away. For a long stretch it was the White Lion, with the Red Lion a stone's throw off in the same village; Mike Tuer's records close the Red Lion in 1949.

Whether the White Lion was ever a state pub is unsettled. The scheme's roll of 1920 lists a White Lion at How Mill, number 136, and a Red Lion at How Mill, number 112. How Mill is a hamlet in this parish, and the roll habitually places country pubs by parish rather than by village, as it does with the Graham Arms and the Lane End: two Lions on the roll, two Lions in this village, and one of them still serving. Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises answers half of it. It has Hayton's Red Lion, acquired and converted in August 1916, but no White Lion at Hayton or How Mill, so the Red Lion was the village's scheme pub and the White Lion most likely stayed outside, though the gazetteer admits it may have gaps.

The Cumberland News adds a little: in June 1927 the Brampton bench transferred the White Lion Inn, Hayton, from the late Mrs Fisher to William Graham of Hayton, the kind of succession a private house has. Fred and Ida ran it in the middle of the twentieth century and are still remembered for it, and it was revamped in the 1970s to take more drinkers, just before the change of name.

The new name is literal enough. It's Grade II listed, an early nineteenth-century pub in hammer-dressed red sandstone with flush quoins and a slate roof, in a village of old stone cottages. Hayton means hay farm, has one of the oldest walnut trees in the country on its green, and sits on the Hadrian's Wall cycle route.

There may be more to it. Hayton's two notable residents were soldiers of one family at a house called Stone House: Field Marshal Sir Hew Dalrymple Ross, who died in 1868, and General Sir John Ross, who died in 1905. Sir Hew drew people north with him: James Sawyer, who served under him and kept the Kings Head in Carlisle in 1829, was probably brought to Cumberland by Ross, settled at Stone House. A pub called the Stone Inn in a village with a Stone House is worth a second look, though the link is not proved.

The same house may explain the strangest thing on the walls, which CAMRA recorded: a pair of 1904 Christ Church, Oxford boat club oars. Christ Church has provided more rowers for the Boat Race than any other Oxford college, and how two of its blades reached a village between Carlisle and Brampton nobody has explained. A son of the Ross household at Christ Church around 1904 would do it better than anything else on offer, but that is a guess, flagged as one.

The pub has been in the Tranter family since 1983. For a spell it was leased out while Johnny Tranter concentrated on selling Pusser's Rum to pubs with naval connections, and when the tenants left two of his daughters took it on themselves. Solway CAMRA made it Pub of the Season for autumn 2024. Behind the bar, in the door to the cellar, hangs a rare CAMRA mirror, which they will show you if you ask.

By CAMRA's record it is home to two separate leek clubs, leek growing being seriously competitive round here; the Otter runs a leek show too. A mobile post office uses the pub on Monday afternoons. Roaring fire, local ales from Carlisle, Great Corby and Hadrian Border, and home cooking with the steak pie and the roasts singled out; food Friday to Sunday evenings only.