Dog-friendly Cockermouth

A three-roomed free house on Kirkgate with a long list of real ales and bottled beer from around the world, and a CAMRA pub of the season badge to go with it. It states plainly that it is dog friendly, and the pub food is a step above the usual.

A Main Street pub of nearly two hundred years standing, a few doors along from Wordsworth House and at the end of the Watch Hill and Allerdale Ramble routes back into town. Well-behaved dogs are welcomed into the bar area, with water bowls and treats put out; the pub does not extend that to the rest of the building. It is one of the more reliable stops in Cockermouth for a dog on a wet day, most of the town's cafes being counter service with limited seating.

One of the older drinking houses in the Georgian part of Cockermouth, on Kirkgate a short walk from Main Street and the Derwent. Its own site says plainly that it is a dog-friendly pub and that well-behaved dogs are welcome, without carving out a particular room. Six or so real ales are usually on, some of them from the local brewery, and the pub functions as a community room as much as a bar, with board games out and groups meeting through the week.

Eight miles out of Cockermouth on the Allerdale Ramble, over Watch Hill and Hills Wood, down to Isel Bridge on the Derwent and the Norman church of St Michael and All Angels, then back by Gill Wood, Redmain and the fields above the A595. The National Trust grade it challenging, and the sting for anyone with a dog is in stage six, where the route crosses a run of fields on stiles which the Trust's own notes say are mostly not dog friendly. A big dog will need lifting several times. Watch Hill itself is grazed and the half mile of A595 verge near Wood Hall Farm is busy.

Just under four miles and about two hours for 170 metres of climb, out of the town centre by the sheep pasture path to the little top of Watch Hill, which looks over the Derwent valley to Skiddaw one way and the Solway the other. It begins in Cockermouth itself, a few minutes from Wordsworth House, and the town's Market Place and Wakefield Road car parks are both free for the first hour or two - a genuine rarity in Cumbria. The lower half is enclosed field path and lane where a dog can be off the lead in the quieter sections, but the hill is grazed by sheep and there are cattle in the valley fields in summer, and one narrow squeeze stile on the return will need a hand for a broad dog.