The Oak at Curthwaite

History

There is a mounting block still standing at the right of the front of the Oak at Curthwaite, which tells you what this was: a roadside inn you arrived at on a horse. It is a destination dining pub now, out west of Dalston towards Wigton, small, well reviewed, and ambitious enough to run a tasting menu, which is rare this far out. Its kitchen holds two AA Rosettes.

The name is new; the building is not. It was the Royal Oak Inn, and it still is on paper: that is the name the premises is registered under for food hygiene, inspected as recently as November 2025. Historic England listed it Grade II on 11 April 1967, as a public house of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century: mixed red and yellow sandstone with painted V-jointed quoins on a chamfered plinth, two storeys and three bays with a lower two-bay extension to the left, sash windows with glazing bars in painted stone surrounds, and one window sitting in a blocked central doorway of the extension. The twentieth-century tile roof, plank door and brick porch are noted as later.

It sits at the western edge of what this site covers, in the parish of Westward rather than anything Carlisle, and the State Management Scheme reached it even so. The scheme's own roll of 1920 lists the Royal Oak, Curthwaite, at number 119, under the name the building still carries on paper. It took the house in 1918, turned it over to a tenant in the late 1960s and sold it in 1972-3. Another pub stood nearby, the Masons Arms at Chalk Foot, East Curthwaite.