MOTORWAY SERVICES I Tebay Services. M6 Northbound, Cumbria, England

Possibly the best motorway services in the world

The majority of motorway service stations are shite right? Not this one. In 1972 the M6 fearlessly slashed it’s way through the beautiful Cumbrian countryside and in particular the hill farm owned and run by John and Barbara Dunning. With wonderful optimism they viewed this as an opportunity rather than an outrage, opening a small cafe to feed the hungry drivers. More than forty years later they’ve built a small but happy empire that makes you long for every motorway pit stop to be like Tebay.

Many farm shops now seem to be a farm in name alone but there are still 1000 acres of upland here and the beef and lamb sold in the wonderful shop could well be from the animals you see in the fields around you. They also have a strong commitment to localism beyond their own farm, stocking some wonderful produce from other small scale suppliers in the area. Much of this produce is also available in the latest version of that original small cafe, it’s not fast food but it is available fast and it tastes like you might have cooked it at home. It’s honest simple tasty food, the antithesis of the over-franchised, over-packaged, over-chilled fodder at most other services. Is this that hard to achieve? Services, by their nature, should surely have the best access to delivery routes compared to almost anywhere else in the UK so why is it the norm for the food to be so uniformly lifeless?

You can also stay overnight at Tebay, in their hotel or campsite. This gives you a great opportunity to take a walk from the back of the services out into those magnificent Westmorland hills. After a mile of walking at dusk, you can look back over the valley and see the motorway snaking relentlessly through the landscape with the soft glow of Tebay nestling in a small hollow. Centuries ago the great old coaching inns provided essential respite on long journeys. We obviously travel very differently now but there’s still a need for somewhere restorative that provides good honest sustenance, rooted in it’s environment.

Oh and Tebay Services also sells petrol!