String of Horses Inn

History

Opened Around 1659

Dates from

Around 1659

Serving travellers for

More than 350 years

The most purpose-perfect pub name on this site. A string of horses is exactly what a coaching inn kept ready to hitch to the coaches, so unlike the Coach & Horses or the Nags Head, this one is named for the service it actually provided. The village is Faugh, which the inn's own directions helpfully note is pronounced Faff.

It dates from around 1659, which makes it one of the oldest buildings here, in the company of the Sportsman, the Joiners Arms and the 1684 tradition at the Plough. Oak beams and panelling, open log fires, leaded diamond windows, sandstone fireplaces: three and a half centuries of putting up travellers.

Faugh is out east near Brampton, and the State Management Scheme reached it: its roll of 1920 lists the String of Horses at Heads Nook, number 129, Heads Nook being the next hamlet and the postal address this pub still uses.

By 1961 it was a free house, and the Carlisle Journal featured it on 21 July with a photograph and a caption that is mostly about the dog. Approach the String of Horses, the writer said, and you were liable to be watched gravely from an upper window by a large bull mastiff with his chin on the windowsill. This was Simon, known to travellers from Scotland to the south of England, and the house also had a whippet and two Italian greyhounds who were brothers.

The proprietor was Bill Berwick, a former regular in the Border Regiment and an airman, with spells in the hotel trade at Silloth and Whitehaven behind him, in his third year at Faugh. He had made several alterations and painted the place himself, and the advertisement beside the piece billed it as a free house, with parties catered for and sandwiches always available.

It has been extended over the years into a multi-room inn with rooms and a restaurant, serving local casks from the likes of Great Corby and Allendale. The bar is open seven nights and the restaurant Monday to Saturday evenings, and the en-suite rooms include a four-poster.