The Drovers Rest

History

Setting

On a vallum of Hadrian's Wall, at a narrow Eden crossing

Reopened

2013, after a period of closure

The name records what happened here. Monkhill sits on a vallum associated with Hadrian's Wall, near the narrowest point of the Eden, a crossing used by Roman troops, by Border raiders, and by cattle drovers walking herds to market. A drovers' rest was exactly that: somewhere to stop the beasts on the long walk. The State Management Scheme's jubilee supplement of 1966 called it a half-way house for drovers on their way to the stints on Burgh marsh, and its sign that year showed a herd of cattle moving along the road past the inn with a drover at the rear.

How old it is depends on who you ask. It is Grade II listed, confirmed by the photographer who recorded every state management pub and by a Cumberland Council planning report of 2021, which notes the Drovers Rest Inn and the Old Mill as two Grade II listed buildings, seventy and twenty metres from the site it was assessing. The listing calls the building early nineteenth century; the pub says over four hundred years old. Both are in print and nobody has reconciled them, the same argument that plays out at the Kings Head and the Sportsman: a listing describing fabric, a pub describing a site.

For a hamlet this size Monkhill has kept a lot. The Old Mill next door is listed too, there is a converted windmill in the village, and a Methodist chapel with a school room that still holds village events. Even the parish is unsettled: the pub's address is Burgh by Sands, while the village is recorded as being in the civil parish of Beaumont.

Its licensees are unusually well recorded, which is a rare thing for a country pub. William Forster had it from about 1847 to 1850, Joseph Cartner to 1858 and John Irving from 1858; for a short spell, 1858 to 1862, it was the Drove Inn, but otherwise it has always been the Drovers Rest. Then came two long family tenures. The Braytons held it for about thirty years from the 1860s, William, then Sarah from 1879, then Jane to the turn of the century. The Daltons followed for another thirty-odd: Jonathan from some point before 1914, then Isabella from 1914 right through to 1940.

The scheme bought it in March 1917, and unusually the pub still shows it: the sign dates from the State Management era, and original scheme documents hang on the walls, like the plaques at the Sportsman and the Joiners Arms, but more of them. Hector Dawes had it from 1958 to 1979, and by Historic England's gazetteer it was let to a tenant in the late 1960s, when the scheme began handing its quieter country houses to tenants rather than salaried managers.

The scheme sold it in 1973 for £5,500, by Solway CAMRA's account to the man running it, who sold it straight on to Jennings, as happened at the Woolpack. That figure is worth setting beside the others recorded here: the Caledonian went for £175,100 the same year and the Turf for £26,265. A country pub four miles out was worth about a thirtieth of a Botchergate hotel, the clearest measure on this site of what the scheme owned and how unevenly it was valued. After 1979 the turnover quickened sharply, twelve names between 1979 and 2013, including a closure from January to June 2007.

Then came its best years. The pub was up for sale in the spring of 2013, and that August Bill, Linda and Sarah Robinson bought the freehold with Sandy Williamson and reopened it. What followed was quick: Solway CAMRA's autumn 2014 Pub of the Season, then in 2015 the branch's, Cumbria's and the West Pennines' Pub of the Year and one of four super-regional winners, runner-up in the national final. Sandy kept six handpumps turning over, 357 different beers by early 2016, and the pub doubled as the village shop, a library point and a Carlisle Food Bank collection point. It was Cumbria's Pub of the Year again in 2016.

Tom and Becki Bowles followed for five years, in which it was Solway CAMRA's Pub of the Year and Cumbria's Pub of the Year in 2024 and the branch's winter Pub of the Season in 2025-26. In their time it was opened up inside but still read as three rooms: a bar with a proper winter fire, a dining room and a games room at the back, with four changing beers, often obscure ones, excellent home-made food, and a few basics sold as a village shop on the side.

The Bowleses left in February 2026, and the pub closed long term on 22 February with the owners seeking new tenants. It is the last pub in Monkhill. One review from a quiet afternoon before it shut puts the problem plainly: they were the only customers in, while the Greyhound at Burgh by Sands a mile and a bit up the road was heaving. A four-time county pub of the year can still run out of people to serve. One listing gives Marston's as the operator, which would fit a tenanted country pub whose owners are advertising for new tenants, though nothing authoritative confirms it.