Garsington and Horspath Pubs & Beers

One result of the past couple of months is that I've explored pretty much every footpath within a three mile radius of my humble abode.

Never quite the same, of course, when the walking isn't rewarded by a pint in the pub at the end.  Or midway.  Or at the start.

So for this post, a bunch of pictures of closed pubs in a couple of villages just beyond the busy ring-road, to the east of Oxford.

The start of our route was an unspectacular trudge along the pavements on the boundary of Blackbird Leys until there's an opportunity to branch off on a footpath.

Trouble is, I'm not sure anyone other than me has tried to walk this path at any point this year.  Apart from no obvious route across the fields, there's a challenging overgrown stile at the end...

Experts only. 

But from this point on there are lovely trails leading up the small hill to the village of Garsington.

The village has a grand gated Manor House...

Impressive gates.

Some top-class knitters...

Impressive knitting.

...And the finely located St Mary's church, which boasts some great views from the churchyard across southern Oxfordshire.

Impressive village church.

But, alas, a distinct shortage of pubs.

Which is a shame, as the village was still served by a remarkable three pubs at the beginning of the last decade.
The first you would have come to, heading up the hill on your way from Oxford, would have been the Red Lion.  I managed to find a couple of pictures of it 'in action' here. 

The Red Lion closed in 2014, to be converted into private dwellings.

Private.

A little further along the road, stood the Plough, which closed it's doors a short while before the Red Lion.
Shame, because this was probably the counties Best Pub on a Hairpin Bend.  Possibly the only pub in Oxfordshire on a hairpin bend.
Now somebody gets to live there behind a big white gate and admire their own front garden pub sign frame.

No longer acceptable to turn up and ask for a Punk IPA.

Which brings us finally to The Three Horseshoes on the green. This closed in 2019, but plans were afoot for it to re-open. Initially the residents of Garsington put in a bid to make this a community pub, but it's eventually been brought by a private individual from Horspath.

Hopefully plans won't be derailed to get this back up and running. Hopefully with something more interesting that Old Specked Hen on the hand pulls?

The Three Horseshoes - fine back garden, if I remember rightly.

Heading along the Green Belt Way path, it's a mile downhill to get to nearby Horspath.

So what brings 1400 or so folks to live in the village of Horspath?  Well, they're just 3½ miles (and a wicked rush-hour traffic jam along Cowley Road) from the dreaming spires of central Oxford. They have the pleasant paths of Shotover country park on the doorstep.  

There's not one, but two fine cricket pitches.

And a brewery.

And (for the time being at least) a Lockdown Library...

Really appreciate this - kept me in some good reading material for the past couple of weeks.

 Including all your lock-down beer reading requirements...

Don't I always.

Two pubs...

The Chequers, with a fine location on the green, is predominantly the Gurkha Kitchen these days.  I've never ventured in myself, but apparently it does still retain a public bar serving fine craft beer from Wadebridge, the much sought after 'Doom Bar'.  (Please don't let that and Greene King IPA be all that's available when the pubs re-open!)

The Chequers Inn

The 'proper pub' is just around the corner.
The last time we called in to the Queens Head was a sunny Saturday evening with the place in full swing.  The chaps propping up the bar voiced their appreciation of my choice of Hook Norton 'Blackout Stout', older generations sat at the tables chatting away and watching horse racing on TV, whilst the Horspath youth hung out by the pool table.
It was doing a roaring trade - great to see, and I hope we can see it again soon.

Queens Head.

And just bringing this rambling post to a close, a mention for the village's brewery, Shotover.
They've been concocting ales in the old stable building of Manor Farm since 2009.  I'm quite a fan of their 'Scholar' best bitter, plus the porter when you can find it.

And yes, if you've seen a weird fella in a field, arsing around trying to take pictures of bottles of beers - that was me.

Looking Back At - Cambridge Pubs

Pubs have been closed for 6 weeks now....  oh, how we're missing them....
So I've taken the opportunity to look back at past photos and draft posts never completed, and present below a ramshackle selection of pubs we visited last April on a trip to Cambridge. 
  

Starting with the Free Press (7 Prospect Row, CB1 1DU).  This was the first place we visited when we were released from the Oxford - Cambridge bus (3 hours 35 minutes - "comfortable and stylish", the Stagecoach website advertises - disputable, after the first couple of hours). 
Mrs PropUpTheBar dismissed the Greene King beers ("When are we going to Pint Shop?" she demanded), but I do declare the 'XX Mild' was lovely, and the pub an undisputed backstreet classic.

Heading eastwards, we found a Good Beer Guide entry The Geldart (1 Ainsworth Street, CB1 2PF).

This was an intriguing street corner pub, with several rooms encircling a central bar.  Features included a cool jukebox, a quirky glass piano and pump clips made out of various musical instruments...

And classic LPs on display in the Gents...

Dr Hook's 'Sexy Eyes', Denise LaSalle 'I'm so Hot'
and 18 more of your sensual disco favorites.

I was keen to make a re-visit to Live & Let Live (40 Mawson Road, CB1 2EA), one of the first pubs I ever went to in Cambridge, many years ago.

No glass piano's or Erotica LP sleeves on the walls here - this is a no-nonsense backstreet boozer.  Looking at the picture below makes me really miss a visit to the pub.  How I'd like to be settling down in the corner there, with a pint of Oakham ale in front of me...

Shades of brown.

On this weekend last April it was stonkingly hot - the good people of Cambridge were almost in danger of me getting out the shorts and revealing my dazzlingly white legs.

The crowds were out in force...

Looking much quieter today, I expect.

An especially popular good weather spot was The Mill (14 Mill Lane, CB2 1RX) - plenty of vacant tables inside, with the vast majority of customers spilling out with their plastic pint pots onto Laundress Green.

The Mill.

I had a lovely pint of locally brewed ale in the Mill, but all wasn't well for those looking for summery gin-based fruit cup liqueurs...

A year ago, this was the biggest crisis that we could envisage.

We were in full tourist mode, poking our heads into College quads, obstructing the pavement to take pictures and stepping out into the road in front of cyclists.

And an obligatory pub stop for the tourist is the Eagle (Bene't Street, CB1 3QN).

Tourist-pub-wise, this is to Cambridge what the Eagle and Child is to Oxford.  Except instead of Tolkien and Carroll, they have Watson and Crick, announcing the discovery of DNA in the pub in 1953.

The Eagle beats the Eagle and Child hands-down on beer choice, spaciousness and character.  It stretches back into several rooms, including the RAF bar at the rear, complete with a ceiling covered in graffiti by World War II pilots.  

Failed miserably to get a shot of the RAF room ceiling of graffiti, so all I can offer is this slightly blurry 'blokes at the bar' picture.

I should briefly mention the Cambridge Blue - seeing as I always end up in it whenever I visit the city...

But prior to 2019 I didn't know they had a sister pub - the Blue moon (2 Norfolk Street, CB1 2LF - web).  This appears to focus on live music, with some decent sounding rockers sound-checking whilst we were there.

And craft ale, with some especially tempting and foolishly strong double IPAs and stouts on the keg lines.  I stuck to the more sensible Abbeydale 'Salvation Breakfast Stout' on cask.  Spotting the notice board, I felt it a better option than asking for Carlsberg.

No nonsense signage.

There are so many great looking pubs scattered throughout the terraces north of Mill Street that it's difficult to pick which ones to fit into your itinerary. We followed the Beer Guide and called in to the The Kingston Arms (33 Kingston Street, CB1 2NU).

Did I pick the beer on the Budget Bustin' Pump?
Yes - I'm a skinflint - of course I did.

But would we have to close the pubs in the
event of Armageddon?

And a final mention goes to the Old Ticket Office (Unit 1, Cambridge Railway Station, CB1 2JH), a nice conversion of a redundant part of the train station.  A trip around the country visiting great pubs and bars at railway stations would be quite a good project, when we're allowed, wouldn't it?

Shades of green.

The nature of my forgetting to take pictures, or just plain forgetting where we've been, means that this post omits some fantastic places we visited in Cambridge last year.

We did make it to Pint Shop and also enjoyed sitting in the yard at Calverley's Brewery.
I like to seek out a Milton beer when we're over in this direction - on this occasion accompanied by a fine pizza in the Devonshire Arms.  We also ticked off the Maypole, the Castle and the Mitre.  And probably some more - Mrs PropUptheBar will remember.

Those were the days.....

Inside the Elm Tree, I think...

Oxford - Staying In

The blog acts (in a very haphazard way) as a diary of trips I've made and places I've visited.  So, lest I ever look back and wonder why there so much inactivity in the Spring of 2020, this post is to remind me of Lockdown Britain.

Supping a pint of Young's Special in the back rooms of the Kings Arms...
Taken for granted until a few weeks ago.

Back on the 14th March I was in Wantage, the relaxed atmosphere at the beer festival (the last of those for a little while) providing a shred of hope that life could carry on as normal.  Everyone just needed to learn to wash their hands properly whilst singing happy birthday twice, then everything would be alright, wouldn't it?

It really took Wetherspoons head honcho Tim Martin publicly proclaiming that pubs should stay open for me to realise that they really probably shouldn't.

Closed.

We're in super-strange times, practicing 'social distancing', a concept which would have been completely alien a few months ago.

Words like covidiot have come into the vocabulary.

And I've learnt that what I was doing just prior to being instructed to stay at home was 'doom-scrolling'.  I've now restricted myself to one update on the news a day, spending the rest of the time on intellectual pursuits, such as watching all the Friday the 13th movies and daily doses of Richard Osman's House of Games. 

An eerily empty Oxford is looking lovely...

Pubs, clubs, bars and restaurants throughout the country shut on the evening of Friday 20th March.  No propping up the bar for the time being, just topping up the bottle collection for consumption at home. 

Back at the end of March we pushed the boundaries of our daily exercise a little, walking across the meadows to North Hinksey and to the Tap Social Brewery.  At the time they were operating a pop-up off-licence. (This has since shut: having sold-out of beer, they've understandably decided not to ask their staff to travel in to brew and package new products.)

Pop-Up Shop at the shutters of Tap Social.
Picture borrowed from Tap Social's FB pages, 'cos it's better than mine.

They were running low on stock when we arrived there, but we managed to fill the backpack with a few goodies, including a delicious Imperial IPA, 'Too Cold to Skate', from Alphabet Brewing Co.
I surmised that Gareth must have been there when they opened the shutters, snapping up all the remaining bottles of 'Grebe's Procession'.

In the vicinity of Oxford we have Church Hanbrewery, Loose Cannon, Lovebeer and Little Ox, offering home deliveries of great beers.

Here's our weekend selection, kindly brought to the door by the folks at Little Ox...

Support your local brewery.

Retired Martin is doing a wonderful job of trawling his blog archives and making the likes of Ilkeston and Newport look like essential pub-ticking trips.  Great for planning excursions for when we come out of the other side of this crisis.

In the meantime, let's hope that everyone stays safe, and that the closed pubs can spring back into life when they're eventually able to open their doors again. 
That first pint is going to taste great!

It's Easter, the sun is shining, and here's some daffodils at the bottom of South Park...
Take care.

Wantage Beer Festival and Pubs - a last weekend of normality?

The 10th Wantage Beer Festival, on Friday and Saturday 13th and 14th March, just managed to go ahead, creeping in before the current Covid-19 outbreak took a turn for the worse and even a visit to the local pub is being advised against.
Troubling times indeed.

Social Gathering.  Now frowned upon.

We received a warm welcome from the White Horse CAMRA representatives at the entrance to the Beacon Centre.
There were around a dozen members of the Oxford branch who'd make the trip here today, and it was a pleasure to get together and enjoy the ales, putting the doom and gloom of world news out of our minds for a while.

Wantage beer fest always manage to get a nice mix of local ales and a selection that you're less likely to see.
The 8% ABV Barley Wine from Corinium Ales proved to be a popular choice and was a fantastic tipple - albeit, just the third of a pint measure being advisable.
It's also been a while since I've seen anything by the Farringdon Brewery - their finely named 'Black as your Soul' being an enjoyable (very) dark mild.
Wiltshire was well represented, with Hop Kettle managing to throw in a contender for beer of the day, alongside a number of the counties breweries that I'm less familiar with.

Ready to serve.

Last time I wrote about this beer fest, we headed around the corner afterwards to the wonderful and highly recommended Royal Oak.
So this time I thought I'd cover a couple of other pubs that make a beer-drinking trip to Wantage well worth the effort...starting with this one:

The Shoulder of Mutton (38 Wallingford Street, Wantage, OX12 8AX - web)
I've always really liked this traditional Victorian street corner pub - full of character and reliable for a good pint of beer.
There's a left/right conundrum on the way in.  Heading to the right, service is from a small counter to the side of the bar, on the corridor leading to the rear yard and function room.

The lady behind the bar is not transparent in real life...

No idea how I managed that.

There's always been a robust choice of ales in the Shoulder of Mutton.  From the beer list below, I made a fine choice, picking the 'Heartbreak' stout, from Barefaced Brewing of Bournemouth.

Butt's Barbus tempting due to the artwork.

Between the two rooms of the pub is a great snug, with white wood panelling and cushioned seats around one large table.
We shared this with a trio of professional beer tickers, in their caps and t-shirts advertising Ealing Beer festival 1998 and such like, jotting down notes of the ales tried at the Beacon.
There's no music or distractions at the Shoulder of Mutton, just the gentle hum of conversation from contented ale drinkers.

Glasses emptied, we moved on, straight across the road to another of the town's Good Beer Guide pubs.

The Kings Arms (39 Wallingford Street, Wantage, OX12 8AU - web)

This used to be a neglected and run-down town boozer, but has been successfully resurrected in recent years.  With a make-over which just about manages to retain an historic feel, it was proving a popular spot this Saturday afternoon with a good crowd of customers.
There was a superb selection of beers on the bar on this visit.  A Dark Revolution session ale, 'Sonic', was my pick of the bunch, whilst I headed back a while later to try the murky, fruity, modern IPA from Elusive.

Leaving the pub, we walked up the road just in time to see an Oxford bus departing.
Which meant a 20-minute stop-off and an Arkells '3B' in the Bear.
We ALWAYS just miss a bus and end up in the Bear.

Back on the S8 a short while later, we pressed the stop button and jumped off in East Hanney.
There's a handy house locator for the villages of East and West Hanney, ideal for tragic people like me who can't use Google maps cause they've run out of phone battery uploading pump-clip pictures to Untappd.

We found a footpath, promising West Hanney was a half-mile away, and took a brisk stroll across the fields as dusk approached.  Ten minutes later, as the path took us through the churchyard, we could see the lights of The Plough Inn...

The Plough (Church Street, West Hanney, OX12 0LN)
This is one of nine community owned pubs across Oxfordshire, having been brought by a local group when Punch Taverns put it up for sale in 2015.
Dating back to the mid 17th century, The Plough is timber-framed with thatched roof and a great country-pub feel to it.
The furthest room looked to be set up for dining, although I didn't venture into it (half-arsed, pub explorer!).  The tables around the bar are on two levels, with cosy corners and a door through to a pleasant garden.

From four ales on the bar, I grabbed a 'Chapel Rock' by Skinners, which was in fine condition and an enjoyable pint.

A big thank you goes out to our friends Tim and Marta who unexpectedly came to pick us up from here, hence saving a stagger down the country lane in the dark.
And a big apology goes out to Tim and Marta for my subsequently falling asleep on their sofa.  I blame the Corinium barley wine!

I was gonna end this post with my jovial plans to get around all those remaining Oxfordshire Good Beer Guide pubs which have so far eluded me.
But due to the Perils of the Pandemic, it's questionable whether pubs can, or should, stay open.
We've an obligation to support our NHS by not acting in a way that assists the spread of the virus.  But on the other hand, I fear for the many businesses which, without significant government support, rely on our custom to survive.

Looking forward to a time when I can get back to planning nationwide pub crawling...
Take care.