If there really is a heaven, let it be a pub garden on a summer’s day, ideally
with a tinkling trout stream, some shady apple trees and the buzz of
convivial conversation.
Here’s our countdown of 10 classics across Britain and Ireland – the sort of
places where you’ll pop in for a quick one and find yourself, quite
accidentally, settling down for the whole day.
SQUARE & COMPASS
Worth Matravers, Dorset The Jurassic Coast makes something of a speciality of
seaside pub gardens. The Anchor at Seatown and the Smugglers Inn at
Osmington Mills are good, but for off-the-map eccentricity, the Square &
Compass is better.
Just getting there is exciting – via a deadend lane through the Purbeck marble
workings, where you can still see stonecutters in their roadside shacks,
fettling away as they’ve done for centuries. The Square & Compass
was the quarrymen’s local, a whitewashed tavern with beer and cider straight
from the cask, and its own homespun fossil museum, chipped from the
limestone cliffs by the Newman family, landlords here for 101 years.
The sunny garden is the real find, though, with marauding poultry and vast
views that vault the village rooftops to the sea. It is staked out with
strange bits of sculpture, leftovers from the pub’s midsummer stone-carving
festival, and every table is a mini Stonehenge.
01929 439229
THE SPANIARDS INN
Hampstead Heath, London The Spanish ambassador had it built as his pleasure
grounds, Dick Turpin used it as a lookout, and John Keats wrote Ode to a
Nightingale there. The garden at the Spaniards is full of shaggy-dog
stories.
Marooned on Hampstead Heath, this is as close as you’ll find to a country
hostelry in the capital. Indoors: creaky floors, Harveys ale and more
ancient beams than the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Outdoors: a blossomy
terrace, an outdoor bar, a chicken coop for kids to coo over and strolling
space among the hop-hung arbours (in case you have one glass too many and
don’t fancy yomping over the heath to Kenwood House).
There are weekend barbecues and bank-holiday spit roasts, and if you’ve
brought your own shaggy dog, even a “pooch wash”, where you can shampoo the
schnauzer before wetting your whistle.
Spaniards Road, London NW3; 020 8731 8406
THE TROUT AT TADPOLE BRIDGE
Buckland Marsh, Oxfordshire It feels somehow wrong to arrive at the Trout by
car – especially once you’ve installed yourself at a teak table beside the
infant Thames, with narrow boats sliding by and punts slaloming into the
pub’s private moorings.
Cast adrift in Wind in the Willows country, the inn has been given a makeover
by new landlords Gareth and Helen Pugh, with lots of scrubbed slate and
fresh flowers indoors, and rather posh nosh such as foie gras wrapped in
prosciutto. But it’s not pretentious: proper locals pop in for a pint, and
there are sometimes junior Pughs playing footie in the garden – where the
apple trees come in handy for stocking the dessert menu.
If you fancy a float, the Trout can arrange a crewed gondola – with champagne
picnic, naturally.
Doubles from £110, B&B; 01367 870382, www.trout-inn.co.uk
THE GROES INN
Ty’n-y-Groes, Gwynedd Dawn Humphreys’s spick-and-span inn hunkers down among
the lumpy Snowdonian foothills behind Conwy Bay, with sunsets on tap and a
frieze of mountains for a backdrop. The setting doesn’t really need
horticultural help, but she’s gone the extra mile, with barrels of exploding
pink hydrangeas on the terrace out front and cottagey lawns behind, lined
with geraniums, buddleias and roses.
In summer, there is free-flowing Pimm’s and homemade cinnamon-and-honey ice
cream. And if you can’t leave that view behind, the Groes has 14 super
rooms, several with balconies commanding the hills.
Doubles from £103, B&B (£130 with view); 01492 650545, www.groesinn.com
THE LADE INN
Kilmahog, Stirling Wedged under the skirts of Ben Ledi, loftiest of the
Trossachs, the Lade is a family affair. Patriarch Frank Park is “chief
bar-propper”, his son Stephen (ex-Ritz hotel) cooks the haggis, and
son-in-law Fred is in charge of beer-tasting – he also runs the adjacent
real-ale shop, which stocks 100 Scottish drops, including organic microbrews
Way Lade, Lade Back and the knee-wobbling Lade Out.
Mum Rita is the gardening guru and has embellished the marvellous mountainside
setting with a firework display of fuchsias, petunias, lobelias and
geraniums, variously erupting from window boxes, tubs and flowerbeds. Just
now, her garden is alive with cherry blossom and tadpoles (there are three
separate ponds), but everyone’s favourite corner is the bird-feeding
station, planted with reeds and teasels to attract greenfinches, swallows
and tits – even a family of greater-spotted woodpeckers. Take your camera.
01877 330152, www.theladeinn.com
THE BRAZEN HEAD
Dublin Ireland doesn’t much go for pub gardens, maybe because of all that
“soft” Irish weather. A cobbled courtyard offers much better runoff, and
here’s a classic – a sunken space contained between the skewwhiff walls and
crooked windows of the oldest alehouse in Ireland (so they say, anyway). A
10-minute walk upriver from Temple Bar, the Brazen Head dates to 1198 and is
populated by a winning mix of grizzled old-timers, louche students and lost
tourists. Live bands rock out, the craic is mighty and everyone spills out
into the yard, with its beer-barrel tables, “medieval fire lamps”,
cobblestone floor and creeping ivy.
00 353 1 677 9549, www.brazenhead.com
THE HORSESHOE HOTEL
Egton Bridge, North Yorkshire For many, the Horseshoe is the penultimate stop
on the Coast to Coast Walk – and you couldn’t be blamed for abandoning the
trek here, with just 17 miles to go.
A classic streamside local, the inn is tucked into a hidden hem of the North
York Moors and is reassuringly old-fashioned. There’s Black Sheep on hand
pump and Whitby fish pie in Yorkshire portions; dogs are allowed in the bar,
but not children.
This doesn’t matter, because in summer you’ll be in the sylvan garden, with
its 100ft sequoias and lawns that gambol down to the chittering River Esk,
complete with coffin-shaped stepping stones, perfect for youngsters
“accidentally” to push each other off.
Doubles from £50, B&B; 01947 895245, www.thehorseshoehotel.co.uk
THE FLEECE INN
Bretforton, Worcestershire This atmospheric black-and-white inn dates back to
the days when a farm was a long house and a barn was a byre. The Byrd family
lived here with their beasts in Chaucer’s day, and when they finally handed
it over to the National Trust in 1977, it looked much the same, minus
manure. That means priceless Stuart pewter, a murderous array of spears in
the inglenook and “witch’s marks” on the hearth to scare off nonalcoholic
spirits.
The garden is behind the old farmhouse, and it’s a cracker: a miniature
orchard of antique apple varieties, where you can sup homemade cider beside
the thatched crook barn – so picturesque that people regularly get married
in it. On summer weekends you can hardly move for hog roasts and morris
dancers; and on May 26-27, the Vale of Evesham British Asparagus Festival
moves in, featuring a farmers’ market, ye olde crafts, and asparagus
gastronomy (more spears).
Doubles £90, B&B; 01386 831173, www.thefleeceinn.co.uk
THE LORD NELSON
Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk This must be the most unspoilt theme pub in Britain.
In the village where Nelson was born, and 120 years older, it is stacked to
the gunnels with prints and ephemera, and serves a secret-recipe tipple
called Nelson’s Blood, inspired by the barrel in which the admiral’s corpse
returned to Blighty. But all this doesn’t dent the pub’s charm. There’s a
serving hatch instead of a bar, old settles and Woodforde’s Wherry tapped
from the cask – and a grassy garden big enough to stage a full-scale
reenactment of Trafalgar, with tree-shaded tables and a mini assault course
for kids.
01328 738241, www.nelsonslocal.co.uk
THE DRUID INN
Birchover, Derbyshire Okay, so this one’s a bit of a cheat. It’s not so much a
garden as a patio with a rockery. But what a rockery.
Enigmatically positioned among Peak District pastures pimpled with stone
circles and monoliths, the Druid is run by chef-patron-brothers Michael and
Bryan Thompson, whose brilliant British food comes newly garnished with a
Michelin Bib Gourmand – their steak-and-stilton sandwich has won prizes.
Scoff that on the flowerpot-strewn terrace, then scamper up the jungly
pathway behind the pub to conquer Rowtor Rocks. This is top fun: a knot of
gritstone pinnacles fashioned into a Flintstones-style adventure playground
by a barmy 17th-century aristocrat. Some of its carvings date back further:
maybe to the Druids themselves. There are hermit caves and rock-hewn thrones
where you can perch awhile and let your imagination fly over the Peakland
hills unfurling below.
01629 650302, www.thedruidinn.co.uk
