AT OUR WHITLEY'S END

With the prospect of a reasonably fine day last week, I had an outing with one of the local ramblers groups.  We started from the White Hart at Whitley.  The pub has 17th century bits but I believe the original parts are 14th century.

And although it didn't rain until later, the signs of recent storms were all around.

 And we had to take a detour at this path (just as it started to rain!).

 

Some liked the water better than others.

 

I guess the golfers didn't like this much on the 4th green and 5th tee.

 

When the sun was out, the woodlands were beautiful.

 

I haven't posted any pornographic trees for a while, so here are a couple from this walk.

And there were stunning views across the Surrey countryside

with some pretty little cottages.

The Dog and Pheasant is a lovely pub, I suspect mostly 16th century, now a popular foodie restaurant.  We sat in the garden though and ate our sandwiches.

The footpath is hard to miss on the hill down the other side.  But it was perversely the hardest part of the walk, being wet and slippery and at a rather unhelpful angle.

We are blessed with snowdrops almost everywhere at the moment.

And then we were back in the old village of Whitley, with its historic cottages.

A nice example of the local pointing style called 'galletting'.

BEYOND THE WORLD'S END

With the change in the weather, we decided to drive down to the West Country.  What's the opposite of 'snowbirds'?  Sunbirds?  On the way, we stopped for lunch at a delightful little pub called World's End.

We then travelled on further.  I'm not sure what it might be called beyond the World's End.  After Earth?  But we did arrive at a suitable coastal spot in time to sit and watch the sun go down.

This is the idyllic beach bar of the New Quay Inn, so called because it was built at the same time that they built the new quay in 1661.  It was odd, given the weather we've been having lately, to relax on the beach in shirtsleeves, enjoying the view, the wine, and the music (Trojan Records Greatest Hits), and then to discover that it was 9 o'clock!  Great start to our mini-break though.

And this is where we have been spending a fair amount of time since we arrived - this is the Triangle in Teignmouth.  I'm sure I've mentioned it before - 7 cafes all coming into their own in this glorious, if probably brief, summer.

I wonder what's happening at home.  On the other hand, who cares?!

HALF-GUESTS SOMEWHERE

I blogged once before about The Pub With No Name.  It used to be called The White Horse (still is on maps), but the road was diverted some years ago and the sign board removed (one story is that it disappeared in a gale.  Who knows?) It's been known locally as the pub with no name since.  The sign post (with no name on it) is still near the main road, but there are no direction signs up the country lane or along the unmade track that eventually leads to the door.  It's a sort of local joke.

Trust me then last week to choose an evening with thick fog to meet friends there for a meal.  After passing the turn-off, completing a three-point turn on a main road with ditches and almost zero visibility, I then crawled along the lanes, trying one then the other, until I found the car park.  I guessed that the pub must therefore be somewhere nearby.  You can tell it's popular by the number of cars in the car park and you can tell the food's good by the number of expensive cars!  The pub is a 17th century wayside inn, with a fine kitchen and great local beer, and is popular with walkers and diners alike. 

Although we were seriously late, our friends turned up just after us looking shell-shocked and relieved at the same time, having had similar experiences in the fog.

We were half-guests.  Our friends had won a pair of tickets in a raffle that I had organised and so had invited us along to share the prize and we split the remaining bill.

It was well worth the difficult journey.  Here's the bar.

The drinker posed for me!  And this is one of the dining rooms.


 A good evening was had by all, especially by us the half-guests.

INCLEMENT WEATHERSPOONS

Grumpy Old Man Blog #33

Don’t you just hate Weatherspoons pubs!  I ate there last night and I couldn’t believe the place.

Weatherspoons come to our nice little towns and villages, taking away valuable business from the old established pubs, restaurants and cafes that we love.  They buy up beautiful old buildings, usually existing pubs, and then do them up, turning them into pubs with restaurants attached, packed with people and just destroying the run-down, slightly dirty, character of the original place.  

The Red Lion in Petersfield is just one such.  It incorporates the oldest pub in the town and is itself an important 18^th century coaching inn (the old London – Portsmouth road ran past here).  Then along come Bloody Weatherspoons.  And what do they do?  They waltz in, renovate everything, restoring all the lovely timbers to their original condition, and generally clean up and prettify the place.  It is now a spectacular example of old inn construction.  And I’ve seen exactly the same sort of wholesale refurbishing in Haslemere with the old Swan coaching inn – lots of original timbers preserved and displayed, sympathetic treatment of the old dining room and generally bringing the place back to its original glory.  They reportedly spent nearly a million quid on doing up the Red Lion.  But they don’t fool me!

The carpet!  I mean what’s that all about?  It’s thick and luxurious and a subtle mauvey colour, very much in keeping with this year’s living room colour schemes, according to the designer catalogues.  But why would you go to a designer catalogue for your furnishings?  And who has a fashionable carpet in their living room?!  It makes all the hundreds of customers lounging around with their wines and beers feel as though they’re relaxing at home.  Who wants to feel at home in a pub?!!!  And comfortable at that!!!!  There are even corners with easy chairs and bookcases of books that you can read whilst enjoying a coffee.  Lots of people take advantage of this facility, but who really wants that?  Pubs should be heaving and jolly and noisy and filled with laughter.  The Red Lion is all those things too, but that’s not the point.

And talking of beers – they have hundreds of different brands on offer, from all over the world.  How are you expected to choose?  Even if you manage 6, as I did, you can’t get through half of the range on offer.  And now I see they’re having a beer festival next month.  A beer festival!  Anyone would think this was a pub.  Well, it is of course, but we don’t need even more varieties of beer to choose from, do we.  There will not only be all the international bottled beers (one was from Latvia for goodness sake!), but now they are offering a dozen different cask-conditioned ales too.  I ask you!!

Coffee, by the way, I shouldn’t let them get off without telling you about the coffee, costs 99p.  Where else in the whole of Petersfield can you get a coffee for 99p?  And that’s cappuccino, latte, mocha, whatever you want.  Any old rubbish in fact.  Even down the Methodist Church it costs £1.  And there you have to promise not to do any evil for a while in exchange.  I bet Weatherspoons don’t insist on you being good.  Ha!

And, finally, the food.  Do you know, we ordered steak and kidney pudding with chips and peas (and extra gravy) which I only just managed to polish off, chilli con carne with rice, sour cream, etc, which was apparently also almost too much to finish, and 2 glasses of a rather excellent Cabernet Sauvignon, and that little lot cost, what do you think?  Go on, guess.  It cost £9.  Yes!!!!  How can someone who’s completely honest charge 2 unsuspecting elderly customers £9 for their dinner?  Isn’t it fabulous?  I mean terrible.

COAST ACCOUNTING

We walked a fair bit along the Northumberland coast.  It is bleak, unspoilt and ruggedly beautiful.  This is the village of Caster, which still makes its income from smoking kippers.

 

Here is the coast we had just walked.  It was a real wild day.

 

And here is one of the smoking houses.

 

If you don't have a map, you can find Caster by smell.  If you don't like kippers on the other hand, give it a wide berth; even the fish cakes I had for lunch in Newton, a nearby village, were made with kippers.

Newton is no more than a collection of old fishermen's cottages and a pub. Indeed there is nothing else around for miles.  We had heard good things about The Ship, although they did rather let us down.  Here is the coastline.  You can just see the cottages in the distance.

 

And here they are, with The Ship in the corner.

The inside is pretty functional, but it was soon packed.  We had got there early to make sure we secured a seat inside. Despite the weather, the outside was soon packed too.

 

But when we realised others were being served before us, we queried our order and found that they had lost it.  These things can happen, especially when a kitchen is busy.  But they had insisted on prepayment (cash - no plastic acceptable around these parts!) and now told us they had sold out of what we had ordered.  I thought this was pretty poor (it might even be illegal) and it took the edge off our enjoyable day.  Moreover, I can't tell you whether the food is any good.

Near Newton is a famous iron church I also wanted to see.  It was built in prefabricated form in late Victorian times to serve the tiny community.  It is probably the smallest church in the county, but it is rather sweet.  It sits inland a little way, under the coast guard station, but otherwise in the middle of open countryside.

 

One of the things I intended to do whilst travelling here was to take a boat round the Farne Islands.  These are uninhabited islands a little way offshore, which are teeming with wild life.  You can get the boat captain to set you ashore for a an hour to wander amongst the flocks of seabirds and seals and take pics to your heart's content.  But only when the weather permits.  The boats go from the town of Seahouses, which consists almost entirely of enormous fish and chip restaurants.  I guess coach loads of visitors arrive during the season.  I was amused by the name of this boat.

 

Despite the claim, there were no boats going out in the distinctly unserene sea.  The tide was low most of the time we were around there, which mitigated against us too.  I was still prepared to go, but then found that there were no puffins on the islands at the moment.  I didn't realise that they migrated somewhere.  So that reduced my interest in pics of seabirds.  I'll have to do that trip another time.
 
We didn't visit Dunstanburgh Castle either.  I'd become a bit castled out by now and anyway Dunstanburgh is now a ruin and looks better from a distance.

 

Here's a slightly closer view from the headland.

 And you can just make it out here from the north across the bay.