presented to the National Trust in 1946. By 2011 it was mainly in private residential use, although the Great Room is opened to the public on several days a year. The Priory itself is still the local parish church, but is open to visitors outside of service times. Cartmel Racecourse dates back to at least the nineteenth century, but grew in popularity when it became a National Hunt course after the Second World War. It started to attract major professionals in the 1960s, and now hosts popular meetings two or three times a year, with its biggest meeting traditionally in Whit Week. Writers who encouraged the growth of tourism to Cartmel include Lancashire dialect writer and BBC broadcaster, Thomas Thompson, who authored sixteen books on Lancashire people and their communities and was fond of Cartmel. The frontispiece in his 1937 book Lancashire Brew is 'Cartmel from an etching by Joseph Knight', the founder of the Manchester School of Painters. Later Alfred Wainwright dedicated a chapter to Cartmel Fell, about north of Cartmel, in his 1974 bookThe Outlying Fells of Lakeland. More recently Cartmel has emerged as a foodie destination. Cartmel sticky toffee pudding was first sold at the village shop in 1984 and grew in popularity: it is now sold in supermarkets around the UK. The Cartmel Sticky Toffee Company, who make it, moved to a larger factory in nearby Flookburgh in the 2000s but still operate and sell from the village shop in Cartmel. In 2002, chef Simon Rogan opened L'Enclume restaurant in the village. The restaurant quickly became one of the UK's most popular, and held top spot as the UK's best restaurant in The Good Food Guide from 2014-2017, returning to the top in 2020. In 2022 it became the first restaurant in the UK outside London and the South-East to gain 3 Michelin stars. Rogan makes use of the agricultural hinterland of Cartmel and most of the produce supplied to the restaurant is grown on the peninsula, including Rogan's nearby twelve-acre (5 hectare) farm. Rogan's second restaurant in Cartmel, Rogan & Co, is also Michelin-starred, and the village also hosts Unsworth's Yard, a collection of artisan-food retailers who use local produce. Transport Cartmel is from the nearest town, Grange-over-Sands, and about from the A590 road, which connects it to the M6 Motorway. Cark and Cartmel railway station has a roughly hourly service between Barrow-in-Furness and Lancaster,