Mumps Hall
Mumps Hall was a seventeenth-century inn on the Cumbrian side of Gilsland. It has become famous because Walter Scott used its evil reputation, and that of its landlady Tib or Meg Mumps (based upon Margaret Teasdale) in his novel Guy Mannering. The inn is not named in the novel, but Scott revealed his use of its reputation in the notes he added to the Magnum Opus edition of his Waverley novels. The building he described was not, however, the present-day Mumps Hall.
Legal documents and tombstones dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seem to confirm the reputations of the building's occupants, and the association of Mumps Hall with the Teasdale family throughout the seventeenth century.
Today Mumps Hall is a grade II listed building, "House of Meg" tearooms occupying the ground floor.
External links
- Link to a website giving a fuller discussion of the history of Mumps Hall and transcripts of some of the relevant documents.
Coordinates: 54°59′28″N 2°34′30″W / 54.9910°N 2.5750°W