Mumps Hall

Mumps Hall was an inn at the confluence of the Poltross Burn and the River Irthing, a site now at the centre of the village of Gilsland in Cumbria. It appears in Celia Fiennes' account of her journey through northern England in 1689; she called it "a sorry place of entertainment" and it was described, but not named, by Walter Scott in his novel Guy Mannering: “The alehouse, for it was no better, was situated at the bottom of a little dell, through which trilled a small rivulet. It was shaded by a large ash tree, against which the clay-built shed that served the purpose of a stable was erected, and upon which it seemed partly to recline. In this shed stood a saddled horse, employed in eating his corn. The cottages in this part of Cumberland partake of the rudeness which characterises those of Scotland. The outside of the house promised little for the interior, notwithstanding the vaunt of a sign, where a tankard of ale voluntarily decanted itself into a tumbler, and a hieroglyphical scrawl below attempted to express a promise of ‘good entertainment for man and horse’." Scott later acknowledged the identity of the inn in a footnote to the 1829-33 ‘Magnum Opus’ edition of the Waverley Novels: "Note 2. ¬ Mumps’s Ha’: It is fitting to explain to the reader the locality described in chapter xxii. There is, or rather I should say there was, a little inn called Mumps’s Ha’, that is, being interpreted, Beggar’s Hotel, near to Gilsland, which had not then attained its present fame as a Spa. It was a hedge alehouse, where the border farmers of either country often stopped to refresh themselves and their nags, in their way to and from the fairs and trysts in Cumberland, and especially those who came from or went to Scotland, through a barren and lonely district, without either road or pathway, emphatically called the Waste of Bewcastle." The description was confirmed by George Mounsey, a local landowner and historian of the village, in his book Gillesland: "This is an exact…