The Sally

History

Opened Built 1895

Salutation is a better name than it looks. It has been suggested to carry a religious meaning, the Annunciation, Gabriel greeting Mary, though signs of that name usually ended up showing a hunting scene instead: a medieval religious name quietly secularised into horses and hounds. At Irthington the locals wore it down further, and the Salutation Inn is now the Sally, the nickname made official, the same pattern as the Lint in town.

The usual date is 1895, for a Victorian coaching inn, but Mike Tuer's records give the inn a longer history: here from the early nineteenth century if not earlier, and always the Salutation except for 1866 to 1882, when it was the Wee Bush.

The setting is the real find. Irthington sits on the Stanegate, or 'stone road', the Roman frontier road running Carlisle to Corbridge that pre-dates Hadrian's Wall, so this is an older Roman line than the Wall the Stanwix and Solway pubs sit on.

The Salutation was a State Management pub. The scheme's own roll of 1920 lists the Salutation, Irthington, at number 120, four places from the Golden Fleece at Ruleholme a mile up the road.

It closed in August 2015 and reopened in November 2016 by CAMRA's record, or December by another account. It closed again in 2023 when Jimmy Little and Shaun Gardner sold it, and reopened under new owners on 13 October 2023. Traditional outside, contemporary and near-industrial within: log fire, home-cooked traditional and European food, and five en-suite rooms, named Banks, Eden, Irthing, Lanercost and Birdoswald.