Pub fanatics name their favourite boozers in North Devon and Torridge...

The best pubs in North Devon — according to the votes of local real ale fans — have been revealed in a new guidebook.

The pubs are contained in the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide 2010, which is published today.

There are 19 inns, alehouses and pubs in North Devon and Torridge in the guide, as well as five local breweries.

In Barnstaple, two pubs are singled out for praise: The Panniers, in Boutport Street, and The Rolle Quay Inn, on Rolle Quay.

The Panniers is a popular town centre Wetherspoon’s pub, whose landlord is Alan Young. Camra and Wetherspoon’s have a friendly relationship nationally.

The pub giant gives all new and renewing Camra members £20 worth of real ale vouchers to spend in its pubs.

The St Austell Brewery-owned Rolle Quay, next to the River Yeo, is described as a “spacious, well-run, two bar pub” which is handy for the local rugby and football grounds. The landlord there, Chris Bates, is a previous local Camra Pub of The Year winner.

Camra describes its guide as a “masterpiece of local democracy”, because the entries are chosen by local Camra groups.

The guide states: “We begin with the beer. Not roses round the pub lintel, Turkish carpets, sun-dried tomatoes, drizzled olive oil and the temperature of the oak-aged Chardonnay. The guide is committed to pub architecture, history, food, and creature comforts. But, for us, the beer always comes first.

“It has always been our belief that if a publican looks after the cask beer in the cellar then everything else in the pub — from welcome, through food, to the state of the toilets — are likely to receive the same care.”

In April the North Devon Camra branch announced that the Hunters Inn in Heddon Valley was its pub of the year, closely followed by the Castle Inn, in Combe Martin.

Some pubs have been struggling to survive in recent times, with many landlords complaining that the pub companies which own many pubs are squeezing them with higher rents and “tied” drinks prices far more expensive than normal wholesale costs.

There have also been dramatic changes in the pub industry in the past ten years, with the emergence of “gastro pubs” and the popularity of cheap supermarket alcohol.

Politicians, including North Devon MP Nick Harvey, have called for changes in the law to help save our pubs from decimation.

"You Can Take A Lady There"...

A proofreader I know, who is of distinguished vintage, once said that Marshall's pub in Boutport Street in Barnstaple was the only place a gentleman could take a lady (for a drink) in the town.

Now, taking nothing away from his town centre local, which has been praised by Camra for the quality of its beer, I think that place has a rival as a venue where you can take a lady, or even a potential lady. Lilico's.

 

I shouldn't be writing about Lilico's here, because it's not a pub. It's a tapas bar. But it is a local independent tapas bar which sells a decent pint of real ale: namely, Cornwall's finest, Tribute. Some bars don't sell real ale, so JOLLY WELL DONE and TOOT TOOT LILICO'S!

Lilico's, The Square, Barnstaple

Adam's Ale Rating: 3 out of 5

Drink this: Tribute

A perverse turn of events in Cornwall

You know how it is early in the evening in a trendy Cornish fishing village, streets lined with tempting quality restaurants, when you go with a scratchy-tired baby and arrive at the Shipwright public house instead?

Looking back the choice seems perverse, I don't know, maybe even perverted.

We should have fled when we saw the menu. Menus on laminated place mats are rarely an indication of imaginative, careful, dining on the horizon.

But as my travels so far have revealed, the quality of food on offer in a pub is not necessarily on a par with the quality of the beer, and so it proved at the Shipwright where I drank a pleasant pint of Doom Bar.

Doom Bar is one of the best beer names in the world; it also has unintended resonance in certain situations.

The pub, in St Ives, was selling itself as a place to eat with large signs inviting in the unwary, and the perverse, and it had big plastic menus on the tables, so it is only fair to judge it by its food too.

As I looked at my big plastic menu, I was ignored by all staff, whose only task in relation to food, it seemed, was to put numbers in a till and take your money (you could go and bugger off, for all they cared, was the impression I got), I chewed on this question: why is buying a plate of food such a problem in our pubs?

Surely this is a simple enough transaction: I pay you £8 for a burger and chips and you provide that advertised food, and here's the crucial bit, in a form which is undisgusting. Seems simple to me! In fact, I didn't go to chef university, but I serve tasty, cheap-ish food at home most nights of the week. But the cack I have been presented with pubs in the UK I would not serve to my family. They would think I had gone up the pole.

The reason, I suspect, that pubs, like the Shipwright, serve up such dismal grub is because they are far removed from the basics of kitchen life and the pleasures of cooking. The idea for the plastic menus, for instance, and the boring food, was probably farted out by a frownsome middle manager in an office at 3pm one bleak Wednesday, one dreak March day.

So this is the meat of the matter: my burger was tasteless, gristly, cheap and soggy. The bun that contained the flesh was sodden with the water used to wash the tasteless heap of salad by its side. The handful of chips were lifeless, tasteless, and, in fact, virtually pointless. My wife's 'prawn salad' was in fact five battered prawns and a bit of tasteless lettuce and two tasteless factory tomatoes. It was, all told, a disgraceful way to accompany a good pint of beer in a fairly unspoiled public house by a busy little harbour.

So much for that. It's not the end of the bleeding world, I hear you rumble. Indeed not.

But why go on about it? Why whinge? Well, with good reason, my friends, with good reason. Our pubs face terrible peril. They are going bust. I want the good ones to prosper. Some will prosper by selling good food, and if they can't manage that, and it takes effort and money to serve food well, then sticking to good old crisps, nuts and scratchings.

Maybe a sandwich.

Maybe a pickled egg. On festival days.

I see joy at the Williams Arms

The boy is enjoying the first stage of a possibly-extreme love of swings. Other park fancies do not elicit even a glint of recognition, but tuck him into a swing and his eight-month-old being radiates with unparalleled joy. A pub with a good swing - even a bad swing - is good news in any right-minded citizen's mind.

So, we - grandparents, parents, boy, and dog - arrived as an early autumn sun was dying over Braunton; a sublime, crystal evening.

Yes, I drank a pint of Doom Bar (a popular Cornish ale, so apologies for this: I always think it can seem a bit thin, despite its lustrous, ruby-looking, depths).

Yes, I ate a pie containing beef AND sausages (don't ask).

Yes, I admired, Fred Dibnah-style, the neat thatch work.

Yes, the barman did seem a little melancholic.

But all that - beer, pie, sky, grumpy barman - was zilch compared to the boy's glowing delight on the swing in the glorious dusk.

Children improve public houses: discuss.

WILLIAMS ARMS, BRAUNTON, NORTH DEVON

ADAM'S ALE RATING: 7 OUT OF 10

DRINK THIS BEER: DOOM BAR, 4 PER CENT

Middle class hikers and small vases of cut flowers in the Rolle Quay Inn

It is good, of course, that fewer fathers are absent alcoholics these days, but the result of fewer pounds spent on ale in local pubs is that landlords are forced to look elsewhere for profits.

Offering food and enticing in women has saved some pubs from ruin. But these changes have also ruined pubs. Barnstaple's Rolle Quay Inn is not at all ruined but it has a minor deterrent: small vases of cut flowers.

I have nothing against small vases of cut flowers, as long as they are kept in their natural home: tea rooms where neat old ladies put china cups on lace doilies.

When I visited the Rolle Quay, it was 7.30pm on a gloomy, but dry, Thursday night at the height of the inglorious summer of 2008. I identified the regulars, because regulars tend to mark their territory like many other mammals. Rather than spraying urine about the place, I assumed, the regulars had opted for the usual pub voodoo of sitting in a line along the bar, where they could talk to the staff and prevent everyone else from enjoying easy access to the beer. This is an old pub game and it should not be attacked, because it forces strangers to talk to regulars and gives regulars a much-needed sense of power.

The rest of the pub, which easily passed the Adam's Ale "window test" (wooden windows good, plastic windows bad) was empty, apart from the furniture: chairs, tables, carpet, framed photographs of local scenes (when men were men and pubs were pubs and small vases of cut flowers were only ever seen in church) oh, and small vases of cut flowers. These days, pubs in Barnstaple are seldom busy on week nights, so the lack of custom was unsurprising. I was, however, dismayed to see small vases of cut flowers on each table.

The Rolle Quay is a St Austell's brewery pub and my pint was made by that Cornish firm. St Austell's beers are refreshing and decent. My pint was clearly from a well-kept cellar.

I had a choice of too many tables with too many little vases of cut flowers, so my eyes darted around like a man lost in a carpark, but I chose a seat next to a window so I could look at an abandoned stone warehouse, the steely sky and the ugly block of mundane new flats (with plastic windows) on the quay. Did prospective custom lurk in that brick and white plastic factory of dreams? To misquote Morrissey, planning regulations have so much to answer for.

I had a newspaper, but did not get the chance to read the tales of murder and rape in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Ten seconds after I sat down, a couple of middle-aged middle-class hikers sat at the table next to me.

I get an almost-religious joy from walking in the North Devon countryside (I LOVE IT BEYOND REASON!)but I have never felt the need to do so wearing khaki shorts. Other people are less considerate.

And it would be easy to reduce to silly caricature the hikers who joined me in the Rolle Quay Inn that evening. So I will. They were aged in their late-50s, he with big grey beard, she with big grey legs. They wore shorts and waterproof rucksacks. I might have hallucinated this, but I think sandals were in evidence. They had the energetic fizz of retired teachers, freed at last from the punishing whims of England's perpetually disobedient, endlessly disappointing, children. If you wanted to button down the cliche once and for all, you would say they were Guardian readers.

I was, unusually, in no mood for eavesdropping, but it was hard to resist their conversation, littered as it was with commuter belt pellets of pomposity and such delights as: "It's always SO much better to come to these backstreet sort of places". Indeed.

No doubt reassured by the wooden window frames and small vases of cut flowers, this pair of woolly explorers were in for a shock when the landlord appeared.

He was a wiry little man of middle-aged years with long, lank, hair and the general air of a hard rocker who spent the 1970s carrying amplifiers and cider for Motorhead. I am sure he is a first-class landlord (the beer is certainly well-kept) but the hikers exchanged glances which said: "I suppose they let him take the orders in exchange for a bag of crisps." It was only when they asked him to thank "the landlord" for their food, and he said "that's me", did they bristle with shocking embarrassment and perhaps even a measure of regret, or even indigestion.

Fifteen minutes earlier, the couple had decided what they wanted to eat from the menu of solid pub food favourites (fish and chips, pie, curry) and had chosen to have starters as well as main courses. I bet they live in a converted grain store.

So they went on, exchanging condescending views about Barnstaple and the pub as if they were the cleverest human beings in all the Queen's land, and there was some private family mini-crisis I couldn't follow, no matter how hard I tried. No other customers arrived, but the pub has a lively darts scene and is (a bit) busier at weekends, I later discovered.

I drank my pint of Cornish ale quicker than I would normally have done, and rolled my unread copy of the Guardian under my arm, like a proper regular, almost. I half feared the hikers might try and speak to me as I got up to leave, still steady on my Brasher boots; we were so near each other.

But they didn't, and I left as the landlord turned on a stereo and allowed a Thin Lizzy song to escape at refreshing volume.

THE ROLLE QUAY INN, ROLLES QUAY, BARNSTAPLE

ADAM'S ALE RATING: 3 OUT OF 5

DRINK THIS BEER: ANY ST AUSTELL ALE, OR HAVE A PUNT ON THE GUEST BEER