What's My Age Again?

On a short afternoon visit to my home town of Nottingham, I had the chance to call into one pub for a pint and a spot of lunch.  So I decided to head back to a heritage classic:
Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem (Brewhouse Yard 1, Nottingham, NG1 6AD - website)

Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham

Stepping inside the pub, the first room encountered is the Ward room, named after the family who owned the inn between 1894 and 1989.  It's one of the most unique pub rooms in the country, burrowing into the sandstone rock.
The handful of tables in this room are popular, and despite us arriving early families and pushchairs had settled there scuppering my attempt to photograph it.  So you get a dull shot of a sign over a door instead...

Vaguely Historical Bit...

During the Crusades (silly fighting over the Holy Lands in the 12th century - something we've of course sorted out in this civilised day and age) Richard the Lionheart made use of Nottingham Castle and legend has it that  knights on the way to the third crusade gathered there.  And naturally stopped off at the inn at the foot of the rocks beneath it.
The date painted on the side of the pub, 1189, is the year that Richard ascended the throne,
rather than a year that anyone can determine the pub originating.

Nottingham Castle sits on the rock above the pub and originally dates back to 1068.  Archaeological digs have shown that the caves were used extensively at this time and it appears that brewing took place in the spot where the Trip now stands, adding some credence to the historic claims. 
But what we don't know for sure is if any kind of inn existed in these early years.  The buildings as we know them today are a 17th century affair, dating to around 1650, although historical maps show an earlier building on the site.  The name Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem was first recorded in 1799.

We settled on a table in Yorkey's Lounge.  This room lies in the front section of the current building with a large oak beam stretching across an uneven ceiling propped up by a central iron post.
Just beyond this, through a doorway next to the fireplace is a small room called the Haunted Snug.
On our visit it seemed to be hosting some sort of meeting, with a procession of retired gents passing our table and struggling through the awkward door.  The majority of them also managed to trip over the raised hearth in front of the fire, proclaiming that it's moved since they were last here. 

Yorkey's Lounge, Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem

Up a small flight of stairs from the bar you'll find the Rock Lounge.  This room is also carved out of the sandstone rocks, although unlike the truly cave-like room downstairs, this feels like a more modern undertaking. 
This room contains the cursed galleon.  The only people who've set about cleaning this are said to have met mysterious deaths. As a consequence it has been put in a glass case and has been gathering dust, untouched for the past 50 years.

The Rock Lounge, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem

Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem is an essential stop if you're visiting Nottingham.  Both pub and tourist attraction.  It's now owned by Greene King, but you wouldn't initially guess it from the range of ales on offer - on my visit there was a run of five hand-pulls on the first section of the bar featuring local breweries, with Lincoln Green, Nottingham Brewery and Shipstone's beers available.  There is also a beer named after pub, the widely-available 'Olde Trip Bitter' originally brewed by Hardy & Hansons.  This is on the bar here, and where better to have one?

There are a lot of pubs and bars that I need to come and visit/re-visit in Nottingham.  Today, with my mum in tow, I couldn't undertake a mammoth pub crawl (she only does those on a Thursday, after skittles).

So instead we explored the city that was her home-town and has changed a lot in the years since she's last been here.

Nottingham Market Square - "they've made a right mess of it" according to my mum, who liked the old fountains.

Later that evening we found ourselves staying in a village north of Nottingham and I'd picked the nearby Old Green Dragon (Blind Lane,Oxton,NG25 0SS) to call in to.

If I was doing something completely bonkers like trying to go to all of the Good Beer Guide listed pubs in the country, I'd be declaring this a 'pre-emptive tick'.

The pub has won Nottingham CAMRA's 2018 Village Pub of the Year award.

Solid line-up.  Transparent pricing. 

The Green Dragon is owned by Dave Brett who founded Way Ahead Records, a ticket agency and shop where I spent a lot of money on dubious metal CDs at the end of the eighties. 
A regular in the pub, he watched it being sold to property developers a few years ago.  But when the development company went bust he brought it himself and set about returning it to a simple village local.
There is one main bar with a giant TV, then two more lounge-like rooms leading off this.  To the rear is a restaurant, closed on our visit, with Monday and Tuesday being the chefs' days off.  But they brought around free slices of pizza, which was much appreciated.
And what a great drinks range for a village pub - craft keg lines, three real ciders and five cask ales, offering beer from local breweries.
I hadn't expected to find a pub like this near where we were staying, so the Old Green Dragon proved a pleasant surprise for the end of the day.