Mumps Hall is a seventeenth-century inn on the Cumbrian side of Gilsland

Gilsland

Gilsland is a village in northern England about west of Hexham, and about east of Carlisle, which straddles the border between Cumbria and Northumberland...

. It has become famous because Walter Scott

Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....

 used its evil reputation, and that of its landlady Tib or Meg Mumps (based upon Margaret Teasdale) in his novel Guy Mannering

Guy Mannering

Guy Mannering or The Astrologer is a novel by Sir Walter Scott, published anonymously in 1815. According to an introduction that Scott wrote in 1829, he had originally intended to write a story of the supernatural, but changed his mind soon after starting...

. The inn is not named in the novel, but Scott revealed his use of it in the notes he added to the Magnum Opus edition of his Waverley novels

Waverley Novels

The Waverley Novels are a long series of books by Sir Walter Scott. For nearly a century they were among the most popular and widely-read novels in all of Europe. Because he did not publicly acknowledge authorship until 1827, they take their name from Waverley , which was the first...

.

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.