Wetheral, Carlisle

Wheatsheaf Inn

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In the 1600s it was the meeting house for the manorial courts. Tenants paid their dues, then sat to dinner with long clay pipes and songs.

Sold to Greenall Whitley as part of Group 4, handed over on 21 May 1973. Who bought the rest

Wetheral's village pub. Dog friendly, sport on, good sized beer garden between the pub and the car park. Locally sourced food and generous portions.

Today: See opening hours
Address: 9 Steele's Bank, Wetheral, Carlisle CA4 8HD
Phone: 01228 560686

Directions Ring them

🏆 Solway CAMRA Pub of the Season (summer) 2024

History

Opened A pub since the early 1800s

A pub since: The start of the 1800s
Earlier use: 17th-century meeting house for the Dean and Chapter
State-run: 1916 to 1973

In the seventeenth century the Wheatsheaf at Wetheral was a courthouse as well as a house. It was the meeting place for the payment of dues and fines to the Dean and Chapter of Carlisle, who held the manor of Wetheral as successors to the medieval priory, and it hosted the Court Leet and View of Frankpledge with the Court Baron, the manorial courts where tenants came to settle their customary dues with the Lord of the Manor. When the court business was done they sat down to dinner, after which long churchwarden pipes were handed round, the glasses were charged, and there were stories and songs.

The same churchwarden pipes still mean something at the Plough at Wreay, where the Twelve Men keep theirs in a cabinet. And the Wheatsheaf has something in common with the Sportsman, which stands on the Blackfriars friary: both are on old church ground. The priory country is all around, with the abbey ruins, the church and St Constantine's Cells a short walk away by the Crown.

It has been a pub for about two hundred years. It came under state control in August 1916, from the Carlisle New Brewery, and stayed a scheme pub until the 1973 sale, the scheme reworking the public bar and servery and enlarging the smoking room in 1963-4. Both Wetheral houses were in the scheme for its whole life, and the Queens a couple of miles away was on its 1920 roll too, at number 109.

It is a survivor. It stayed open as Wetheral's other pubs shut. Lynne and Graham Watt have run it since 6 October 2008. Solway CAMRA made it Pub of the Season for summer 2024, its fourth after 2011, 2014 and 2018, and it has been in every edition of the Good Beer Guide since 2012.

Locals call it the Wheaty. Real fire, homemade food, Corby Ale from the Great Corby brewery as a regular plus a couple of changing beers, Cask Marque accredited. It's small and gets crammed, and it's on a busy road, so the garden is a summer proposition.

In November 1898 its licence was transferred temporarily from Joseph Davies to Wilson Forster, of the Carts Bog Inn at Langley-on-Tyne.