The Otter Inn

History

Distinction

The only pub in the area kept out of State Management

Formerly

The Haywain

In the 1960s, if you lived in Carlisle and had a car, the pub of choice was out at Little Corby. Mike Tuer's records put it plainly: the Haywain, as the Otter was then, was popular because it was just outside the State Management Scheme. From the First World War to the early 1970s it is recorded as the only pub in the area not under State Management control.

Think about what that means. The Apple Tree, the Cumberland, the Wheatsheaf, the Crown at Wetheral, the Stag: nearly everything for miles around spent fifty-seven years belonging to the government. This one stayed in private hands the whole way through.

It started life as the Plough, around 1822 by Mike Tuer's records, and the Cumberland News's reports of the Brampton bench show it changing hands like a private house. In April 1921 the temporary transfer went from the late John Jefferson to his widow. In June 1927 the full transfer went from Mrs Mary Jefferson to Thomas Yare of Great Corby, and in June 1946 from Yare to William Mark, who said he had managed the house since the war but never held the licence. On 27 September 1957 Telford & Scott advertised it as a fully licensed free house, a freehold with the owner retiring, to be auctioned unless sold privately. The scheme's houses were not sold until 1972-3.

As the Haywain it advertised in the Carlisle Journal of 21 July 1961, in a feature on country taverns, as the "first free house outside the State area", with H. G. Boak as proprietor and a car park. That agrees with the story, though the same page billed several of the scheme's own houses, among them the String of Horses and the Duke of Cumberland, as free houses too, so the phrase probably meant free of a brewery tie rather than free of the Board.

There is one awkward document. The scheme's 1920 roll has a Plough Inn at Little Corby, number 107. If that is this building, the story of the one pub kept out would have to mean a later stretch or a different boundary. It is not Wreay filed under the wrong village, because the roll lists Wreay's Plough separately at number 106, and Historic England's only other scheme Plough, at Caldcotes, closed in 1918 and is not on the roll at all.

The rest of the evidence goes the other way. Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises, which drew on the same roll among other sources, lists no pub at Little Corby. The Cumberland News's list of July 1916 of every licensed house in the Cumberland Ward division the Board was taking over has the Queen at Great Corby and the Corby Bridge Inn, but no Plough at Little Corby, though whether Little Corby fell inside that division is not certain. With the bench's transfers, the 1957 sale and the 1961 claim, the Otter's story as the pub kept out looks sound for 1921 to 1957 at least, and the roll entry is unexplained.

It was not quite the only licensed house the Board left alone. Contemporary figures show four premises inside Carlisle itself that were never acquired: the County Hotel, the Red Lion, the Silver Grill and the Crown and Mitre. The County Hotel on that list is the big hotel at Court Square, built in 1852 as the County and Station Hotel and trading today as the Carlisle Station Hotel, not the County Hotel on Botchergate. The Silver Grill was a restaurant, incorporated as a Carlisle company in March 1896 and still on the register. So the Otter can be the only pub in the area kept out and the city can have its exceptions, depending on where the boundary is drawn.

The Red Lion on that list resolves less neatly. The Botchergate Red Lion, now the County Hotel, was in the scheme, sold out of it to Whitbread in 1973 with the Caledonian, so either the list means another Red Lion or it records a moment before the Botchergate house was taken. The Board's own report of 1 November 1916 points to the second: it puts the Red Lion Hotel with the Bush Hotel as houses still being negotiated for, apart from the three it meant to leave alone.

The Haywain became the Otter on 13 April 2016: a hay wagon, the most rural name there is, swapped for a creature that actually lives in the Eden a few yards away. It's an altered village pub now, with a bigger bar area, but it hasn't lost its character. Log burner, home-made food, darts, a monthly quiz, music nights, and the village leek show. CAMRA's survey of May 2024 found keg beer being served through its handpumps rather than cask ale.