There’s something winter does to old buildings. It doesn’t animate them so much as reveal them. The cold sharpens edges. Silence behaves differently. History feels closer to the surface, like bone beneath thinning skin.
Last weekend, during an off-roading adventure in the Lake District, I stayed in two pubs that have been standing for centuries, quietly absorbing lives, weather and change.
The first was The Queen’s Head Inn in Tirrill near Penrith, a pub that’s been serving ale since 1719. Thick stone walls, low beams, flagstone floors worn smooth by time, boots and repetition. A place that doesn’t try to impress, because it doesn’t need to. It’s exactly what you’d expect.
We arrived at dusk. The sky turning pink at the edges, the cold crisp and dry, barely a breath of wind. An almost-full moon hung overhead, watchful. Inside, log fires glowed and the building seemed to tilt gently in on itself, corridors slanting like something designed before straight lines became fashionable.
I felt immediately comfortable there. Not watched. Not unwelcome.
At around nine that evening, after a lovely meal with friends, water began dripping from the ceiling of the restaurant onto the floor behind my husband. The landlady appeared with a bucket to catch the water and explained it was from an en-suite shower in the room above us. ‘Old buildings,’ she said, ‘weren’t designed for modern ways of living.’
It was said lightly, but the phrase lingered.
Later that night, in our bedroom, an intermittent metallic clanging began. Pipes, most likely. Old systems protesting in the cold. Still, half-asleep, it sounded like something else entirely. Like someone inside the walls with a pickaxe, chipping away. Not aggressively. Not frantically. Just persistently. As if trying to break through layers laid down centuries ago.
There’s a fireplace in the bar marked 1719. A simple plaque that serves as a reminder that the building remembers things we don’t. That it existed long before showers and radiators and plumbing threaded through stone not built to receive them.
The question that stayed with me was: How far can we pull the old into the new without destroying it?
The second night, we stayed at The Mortal Man in Troutbeck, built in 1689. Originally called The White House, it earned its current name in the nineteenth century, thanks to a local drinking rhyme. It sits on an old coaching route and wears its history openly. Low beamed ceilings. Dark corners. A bar that feels almost medieval.
The weather remained crisp and dry, but the light had shifted. Daytime sun picked out rich autumnal oranges and greens, deceptive in their warmth.
After dark, sometime after five, the Wolf Moon rose. A supermoon, clear and bright, with Jupiter hanging beneath it like an experimental full stop.
Inside, the pub was lively. Laughter and chatter amongst locals and tourists alike moved easily through the rooms. Dogs slept under tables, while others nosed passers-by for fusses. Maybe treats. I felt entirely at ease there too. No sense of disturbance. No heaviness. Just age, holding its ground.
At one point, I overheard the bartender tell a tourist, ‘It’s been warm in the sun today, but don’t trust the sun in Troutbeck.’
It felt like advice that extended beyond the weather. Another phrase that lingered.
Ghosts of Winter aren’t always apparitions. Sometimes they’re structural. They live in walls that drip and clang because they were never meant to carry what we’ve asked of them. They murmur through old names repurposed, old routes repaved, old buildings tinkered with to accommodate modern comfort.
Winter makes these tensions audible.
And still, we stay. We sleep. We drink. We listen.
Because some places don’t want to be left behind.
And sometimes, they make that feeling mutual.
Field Trips: a series shaped by travel, weather, thresholds and the way places behave.
R. H. DIXON 