INTERLUDE: snippets from the pub world in North Devon and Torridge...

The North Devon Journal and http://www.thisisnorthdevon.co.uk/ has all the best news about the pubs in your community. Here are two key recent snippets:

• At the Union Inn at Stibb Cross, near Torrington, Nigel Harris, his wife Sue and his daughters, Tracy and Beverley, who took over the pub in the summer are trying to provide an extra community service. After the recent closure of the shop in nearby Langtree, villagers were having to travel as far as Milton Damerel or Holsworthy. So Nigel and Sue want to convert the pub’s storage room into a shop selling basic provisions such as bread, milk and newspapers. Nigel, a former haulage driver turned publican, is hopeful it will open in January. He has applied for planning permission to Torridge District Council to change the use of the room. He said: “We’re hoping the pub and community shop will work well together because there is nothing else around here to get these sorts of things. “There has been a lot of community support for the idea and so we thought we would try it and see how it goes.” Good luck to the Harris family. Great idea.


• The owner of a local Chinese restaurant has taken over the North Country Inn on Mermaid Walk in Barnstaple. Businessman James Li, who owns the Fullam restaurant in Tuly Street, plans to turn the Grade II-listed town centre pub into a cocktail bar and Asian restaurant. Restoration work will probably take six months, Mr Li said. The North Country Inn was one of the oldest pubs in Barnstaple when it closed its doors in spring this year. The pub company who owned it, Enterprise Inns, then put the building on the market. The pub, which was already established by 1764, had been with a number of leaseholders and struggled to attract customers immediately before it closed. Good luck to James but I'm sad the oldest pub in Barnstaple is nothing more than a memory.

An unpretentious country pub offers hope

We headed east first, through one of Barnstaple's housing estates, with a fast-setting sun behind us, before wheeling on in to the crepuscular North Devon countryside.

Blocks of flats and prim lawns gave way to sheep-cropped hills, which were greenish then greyish, as a late-summer day turned into an early-autumn night. The thousands of people living in the pub-less housing estate were nowhere to be seen and the country lanes only carried people in motor cars, until we, two pub fanatic outriders, appeared on push bikes, catching flies.

I was keeping a quiet lookout for head-skimming bats, my favourite type, but the only wild beasts on the loose seemed to be unusually-gigantic black birds, which were flying low, indistinct and secretive behind the lowering hedgerows. I thought of a creature I had seen on the Taw estuary earlier that day which looked like a small dinosaur.

For what felt like the first time in months, no rain was falling from the sky. It's uphill as you go north east towards Goodleigh from Barnstaple on the road but the cycling was relatively easy, thanks to the never-ceasing westerly gale which has made the summer months such a joy in the Westcountry this year. My Adam's Ales friend had forgotten to put his lights on his bicycle, so I rode in the rear, illuminating him and the entire road with an unnatural white glow.

His bike was about 30 years younger and £300 more expensive than my old iron horse and he easily sped off on the downhill run. He must have topped 40mph at one point and I feared for his life as he took a sharp right bend without touching his brakes. I cooled it on the corner, having spotted a constabulary vehicle at the junction.

We went to Goodleigh specifically to visit the New Inn, which is listed in this year's Camra Good Beer Guide as a "traditional old village inn" where a "warm welcome" awaits. The New Inn is also know for its good food. So far in this beer odyssey I have been to more town pubs than country pubs, and have, in Barnstaple at least, not been overly pleased with what I have found. Stale corporatism and board room uniformity has infected our public house cultural treasures like woodworm burrows through an old village church.

Like many people, I often turn to the country pub for sanctuary. But the money wizards and pubco vandals, not to mention Taxman, have been playing merry hell with our rural pubs for decades; what good is left? Will places like the Goodleigh local offer any cause for hope?

We put out bikes in the beer garden, wiped the sweat off our faces, and went inside, thirsty as fat men on a merry-go-round. The pub was empty save for a handful of local people, including two well-behaved children, at the bar. The pub did not appear to have been modernised, or "ruined" as I prefer to say, so, like most good old pubs, it was unpretentious and comfortable.

You know you are in a good local when conversations start easily among strangers and the New Inn is that sort of place. There was no fruit machine, jukebox, piped music, or television. The windowframes were made of wood. I felt as if the pub had got to its current state by a long and friendly process of careful and intelligent use by human beings. When I walk in to a McPub I generally get the impression the pub has got to its current state by a brief and ruthless process of careless and shortsighted planning by beancounters emboldened by computer models.

The only small downside was a lack of Devon ale. We drank Cornish Jack, a light, thirst-quenching beer, which is made by Sharp's. This clearly did not fit the "local beer" category, but it was fine, robust, and supremely tasty ale, ideally suited for cyclists and all manner of professional outdoor sportsman. When I went to get the second round, two men were talking about keeping chickens and growing vegetables. If the New Inn was my local, I would be delighted and, more importantly, would make the effort to spend my beer money there.

It is wise to avoid drawing hyperbolic conclusions about the fact that such a very good pub was almost empty on a clear-skied Saturday night in early September; maybe it was just a quiet night. As I later hurtled home through the dark lanes, I hoped the villagers hadn't gone to the Wetherspoon's in Barnstaple, which I knew would be crammed, and which also features, as the vanguard of corporate mediocrity and local dominance, in Camra's Good Beer Guide 2010.

A couple of ales apiece refreshed, and after a discussion about the psychological implications of seeing UFOs, it had been time to leave, with no small sense of reluctance. When we took our pint pots back to the bar, everyone said goodbye.

New Inn, Goodleigh, North Devon

Adam's Ales Rating: 4 out of 5

Drink this: Sharp's Cornish Jack, 3.8%

Camra names North Devon pub of year runner-up

A VILLAGE inn run by a retired aircraft engineer has been named the runner-up in Camra’s North Devon pub of the year contest.

The Castle Inn, in Combe Martin, took second place in the annual awards, behind the much-loved Hunters Inn, in nearby Heddon Valley.

The Castle, which is a free house not tied to any brewery, is owned by 54-year-old Allan Stephenson, who went into the hostelry game after a career at Westland Aircraft in Yeovil.
Friendly

Camra (the Campaign for Real Ale) said the Castle Inn served consistently good quality ales in a friendly atmosphere, and had good staff with a knowledge of beer.

Allan, who also lives in the High Street pub, said he looked at hundreds of pubs before choosing the Castle six years ago.

"It was a case of I had had enough of what I was doing and wanted a lifestyle change. We toured all over the place for pubs and the Castle was very friendly," he said.

He said much of his success was down to the ever-changing roster of quality ales he $; there are never fewer than four different beers on offer, including many brews from North Devon and the West Country. Many of the beers on offer are seasonal.

Allan said: "We are a friendly pub. We get some holidaymakers and I’m in the Camra guide, so we get a lot of trade from that. We also do food and I have a 150-seat function room."

The Castle, a relatively large pub for a rural area, has existed in some form for hundreds of years, Allan, said, although he was unsure of the finer details of its convoluted history.

He knows that the current building is made up of a "mismatch" from various eras, which helps to give it its unique character.

"It was an old coaching inn and at one point there was a bakery," he said.

There are regular music nights at the Castle and Allan, who has a late licence, is open every day of the year apart from Christmas day.

Although he said the pub had suffered a recent downturn in takings, like many other pubs in the UK, he hoped a spell of good weather this summer would tempt in a steady flow of customers. He certainly guarantees a superb pint of beer.

From the North Devon Journal.

A peacock gives me the evil eyes in a remote valley where the gilded agers once danced in the dew-flecked gaslight

The peacock seemed to want to get near me.

Maybe the many evil-eyed creature wanted to get me for some mysterious slight, I thought, as I took another mouthful of ale and pretended not to jump when the beast boomed in the late afternoon like a wild boar at slaughter hour.

There is something about close range large birds which makes me think about self defence, and when I'm in the corner of a beer garden in a steep wooded valley in remote North Devon I know full well the air ambulance could take time to get here. And there would be a scene if I had to wrestle the animal.

But the large strolling peacock was not intent on violence. He found a scrap of bread on the ground and fluttered up to a low roof, from where he watched me. We had reached an accommodation.

I already knew a lot about the pub, but not about the peacocks. Advertising and anticipation can ruin, with good reason, any element of well-I-never-did-see in any pub visit. Once you have been told a certain pub is the greatest creation since eden itself, there is little you can do to avoid trying to demolish that assertion. Human nature being what it is - clever, forgiving, rational - you can't help making up your own mind, which always means clawing holes in the well-knit arguments of the advocates...

And so before I even crept down winding high-hedge lanes to a hidden valley between Lynton and Combe Martin, to pay a visit to the Camra North Devon Pub Of The Year, the Hunters (no apostrophe on the sign) Inn, I was already filled with the type of prejudicial thoughts reporters often carry in their heads, but must always discard.

The beards at Camra (I mean it fondly, gentlemen) are rarely wrong about beer quality, but I have been to Camra-loved alehouses (not in the Westcountry) brimming with as much chummy cheer as a pox-riven yacht scoot to Hades, the home of the departed spirits.

The Hunters Inn, the landlord told me, had been the site of an inn for centuries and was once a haunt of the gilded age, before the late-1960s, when the gilded agers decided to go instead to Portugal or Monaco or wherever they went. Then the place became more of a haunt for coachloads of pensioners staying in nearby Ilfracombe. Now, the pub is trying to move "up market" and pull in locals as well as tourists, to avoid becoming an evil theme pub. The inn does everything a "destination pub" does: offers you hot or cold milk or cream with your coffee, rooms, chefs rather than microwaves and spotty teenagers. I was expecting the pub to be posh, but it wasn't; it was pleasingly ordinary. It felt like a proper local pub, which is an achievement, because not many people live in the valley. Maybe they camp in the woods, guerrilla-local style.

Camra was right about the beer: four Exmoor Ales on offer and my pint was too good to drink slowly. Weirdly, I was the only person drinking beer; everyone else (about four or five groups) were drinking tea or coffee. There is something exciting about pubs in odd locations. There is something odd about pubs in exciting locations.

I hadn't been there long and the peacock wanted to get near me again, perhaps as much as I wanted to drink another pint of Exmoor Ale in that beer garden, but the sky had gone old and the trees were closing in.

HUNTERS INN, HEDDON VALLEY

ADAM'S ALE RATING: 4 OUT OF 5

DRINK THIS: EXMOOR ALE, 3.8%

Hunters Inn website

Exmoor Ales

National Trust information about West Exmoor

North Devon Camra pub of the year revealed

A THRIVING North Devon pub in a breathtaking rural idyll — which takes pains to welcome locals as well as holidaymakers — has been named “pub of the year” by real ale campaigners.

The Hunters Inn, which nestles in the Heddon Valley between Exmoor and the Bristol Channel, is this year’s Camra (Campaign For Real Ale) North Devon pub of the year.

Camra spokesman Chris Franks said the pub had won the award because it served consistently good quality ales, with sympathy for local breweries, in a friendly atmosphere. The pub’s staff was also praised for being knowledgeable and providing good service.

When David Orton and his wife, Deborah, bought the Hunters Inn three years ago they were well aware the pub had been a haunt of the wealthy and well-known — as well as more ordinary local folk — for decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, as the glamorous people increasingly went abroad for holidays, the inn became less glamorous and relied heavily on coach loads of pensioners staying in nearby Ilfracombe.

David, 38, took on the business while living in the local valley in semi-retirement after a successful career selling televisions and music equipment. The Ortons, who were keen to re-stamp a mark of quality on the inn, have since transformed the pub into a proper local, with numerous music and pub game nights, as well as quality food and accommodation.

The inn has become, to David’s delight, a successful “destination pub” and is likely to cement its success in future years as more people, perhaps conscious of climate-damaging air travel, choose North Devon over more expensive foreign holidays. “The original inn was an old tenant farm,” he told the Journal. “And the farm used to sell ales to the local farmers. It became famous with poets and artists because it is such a beautiful spot. In 1895 the inn burned down and the current building was built on the same site.

“The guestbooks are phenomenal; Thomas Hardy wrote about the pub, members of the royal family have stayed here, as well as people like Ringo Starr and Vaughn Williams. In its 1960s heyday, it was very famous.”

The earlier guestbooks have gone to Lynton museum but their spirit lives on. “Last year we repainted the building in its original Edwardian colour scheme and we have been upgrading the accommodation,” he said.

“Real ale is a passion of mine. When we came here there were just two real ales; we now have eight at any one time. We try to support West Country brewers, including Exmoor Ales.”

The pub even hosts its own beer festival in the second week of September. Families In addition to the history, bucolic setting and real local ales, the pub also boasts a welcoming attitude to families and children and no fewer than three chefs producing anything from chips for hungry walkers to top-class dinner for honeymooners.

While some pubs in North Devon are closing their doors or suffering declining takings, the Hunters Inn’s profits are increasing, perhaps proving claims by Camra that pubs that give the public what they want can still prosper in a recession.

David said: “We have trebled the turnover in three years and that is from the support of local trade. “Everybody who had the inn for the past 30 years concentrated on visitors and you can end up with a theme pub. What makes it fun is local trade and locals will only come if the food and beer is really good and that makes it a good pub.

“We have pool, darts and poker, a jazz band called the Heddon Valley Stumblers, a folk night, a pudding club.” And with all the excellent ale, music, games — and scenery — you might think the Hunters Inn could not sound any more perfect.

Well it can: the pub is open 365 days a year and if you do make the effort to visit — by car, bicycle or foot — you are promised a friendly welcome from a committed landlord who is unlikely to boot you out into the rain when the clock hits 11pm.

From the North Devon Journal.

My incantation did not work, and I think I know why.

In September 2008, seven months ago, I blogged a rather tongue-in-cheek "incantation", urging you all to go to the North Country Inn, in Barnstaple town centre. It is probably the town's oldest pub and has (still) not been ruined, as far as I can tell, by redevelopment or fashionable decoration. I really wanted this pub to succeed, to become a much-needed beer-drinking gem; the building and interior are superb, and it has a reasonable location.

I really wanted - want - that pub to succeed, because I can see the potential, but my plea was, in hindsight, somewhat misguided and too optimistic. The North Country Inn, which is owned by Enterprise Inns, one of the giant pubcos who are getting a lot of abuse from MPs, landlords and drinkers, has closed and is up for sale. I don't know who is to blame for the pub closing, but I know why I didn't go there after my last visit.

The second-to-last time I visited the North Country, and I was not a regular, I enjoyed some simple but enjoyable pub grub and a decent pint.  The place seemed friendly, if a little bare and devoid of Proper Local atmosphere, but it had, as I say, potential, not least because of its fabulous wooden windowframes. Well that was then.

The last time I visited, what I took to be the manic desperation of a pub fighting the wrong battle for survival was in evidence: the tacky corporate-style posters in display cases on the wall outside the front door, advertising wares as if the pub was a branch of McDonald's not one of North Devon's most historic inns, and the skull-splittingly loud pop music both indicated to me that this place had missed a trick and was doomed. At the bar, things were worse.

A handful of drinkers, most of whom had yet to see their 21st birthday, I guessed, stood with the unrelaxed demeanour of teenagers everywhere, occasionally shouting chunks of "conversation" above the tinny house music; I actually felt a bit sorry for them; it was hardly a carefree vibe. The barmaid was very friendly, but told me there was no real beer, only lager and Guinness. I ordered a pint of the latter, and the poor girl had no idea how to pour it.

I took my badly-poured pint to the unsurprisingly-empty front section of the pub, and hunkered down beneath the occasional teenage shouts and techno. I went in to a damage-limitation reverie and thought of a bustling, but unmaniac, town centre local, with a row of glorious well-kept local ales on offer, a careful and knowledgeable landlord or landlady busy behind the bar, groups of friends enjoying animated conversations at tables, maybe an old man reading the cricket scores at the bar, a game of darts in one corner, a round of cards in another corner, and all among us the unspoken sense that character and community are better friends than corporations and spreadsheets, and the enlivening feeling of useful escape from work and duty.

I drank my pint as quickly as I could and escaped in to the dank night, keeping my remaining beer cash for another day.

I am a passionate pub lover and I say this with no satisfaction: the deadwood in our pub trade is being felled.

The George Hotel

The George Hotel in Hatherleigh has been almost totally destroyed by fire. The loss of this glorious centuries-old pub is, in pub terms, a tragedy. All that history up in smoke; it can never be restored. But the George can be rebuilt, just as the good old Chichester Arms in Bishops Tawton rose from the ashes after a devastating fire three years ago. Careful and intelligent design and good North Devon craftsmanship should see the Hatherleigh landmark back in action, hopefully quicker than we might imagine while looking now at the North Devon Journal's brutal footage of the inferno.

Village pub landlord calls time for good

From the North Devon Journal:

By Adam Wilshaw

A VILLAGE pub landlord says he is declaring himself bankrupt and quitting the trade after a sudden downturn in profits, adding to fears that North Devon’s public houses are facing decimation.

Patrick Oakey has closed the Fox and Hounds pub in Fremington, where he has been the landlord since 2004, and is moving out of the pub, which is also his home, with his wife and two teenage sons.

Mr Oakey said large numbers of people, particularly younger customers, were being lured away from pubs, such as the Fox and Hounds, by cheap supermarket alcohol. He also said the smoking ban had hit his takings and because of the credit crunch he was unable to secure credit to see him through a bad patch.

Campaigners and senior politicians, including North Devon MP Nick Harvey and Torridge and West Devon MP Geoffrey Cox, not to mention Prince Charles, have warned that thousands of traditional English pubs are in jeopardy, partly because of the economic recession, but also because of the way large pub companies, who own the majority of pubs, often oblige their tenants to buy beer through them at prices higher than cost (known as a tie).

Mr Oakey said: “My client base has always been youngsters and when they walk in the supermarkets and see cheap alcohol they are not going to come in and pay £3 a pint.

“It’s part of village life and it is sad it has closed. Enterprise (the firm which owns the Fox and Hounds) will get someone else in.”

He added: “I will miss it. I have spent four years building the place up. I wouldn’t have another pub.” He also thanked all his loyal customers.

The Fox and Hounds lease is on the market for £97,500. According to Cowling, which is the agent dealing with the sale of the lease, the pub has a turnover of £175,000 with a rent of £23,000 a year.

The Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) has warned that almost 60 UK pubs are closing every month. In the Barnstaple area alone pubs currently on the market include the Wrey Arms in Sticklepath, the Tavern in the town centre, and Funky Munky on the Strand.

The pattern is the same across North Devon and Torridge. A recent Journal investigation found that many pubs in North Devon were struggling to make profits, although local Camra members said good quality pubs which served well-kept beer and good food in attractive environments were still doing well.

Landlords blamed cheap supermarket alcohol and the recession for the decline in takings in recent months. But some pubs are bucking the trend and reporting healthy custom.

I find myself wrestling with the age old battle of love and hate, and contradictory passions in one pub

An ill wind was wailing through the world economy, through all our bones and the future bones of all our future generations for ever, as we made our way through half-deserted streets to one of the most popular pubs in North Devon and Torridge.

I was feeling a bit depressed about the future for our pubs because I had recently met a North Devon pub landlord who was about to declare himself bankrupt and close his business. He said he was being squeezed from all sides; by the pub company, the smoking ban, and by cheap supermarket booze of all types and horrors. But despite all that he could have made a go of it, maybe, if only he had had more of one vital business ingredient: customers.

Sometimes it is good to acknowledge the blindingly bloody obvious. Pubs are closing because customers are not using them, and other pubs are still busy and profitable, because customers are still using them. So how about a case study? One of the most popular pubs in North Devon is the Wetherspoon's outlet The Panniers, in Barnstaple. It will never close. It will survive the recession. It would survive a nuclear war. And on a dank Thursday evening this month, the place was so ramjam pack-a-doodled that when I arrived with my friend we took the only two remaining chairs.

I was still chewing over all the stinking doom in the news. Pub doom. My own eyes weren't helping. Walking to the Panniers through the glistering Barnstaple town centre streets, all but deserted, we passed empty pub after empty pub.

But not the Panniers. There can only be two reasons why the Panniers is such a success; good beer and cheap prices. Because the place has atmosphere the way big brand keg lagers have taste, the way Gordon Brown has a radiant smile, the way David Cameron has sincerity, the way house prices are clever, the way plastic window frames are acceptable in a public house context (no PVC frames at the Panniers by the way, fellow window freaks).

In fact, if you have ever been in a Wetherspoon's pub anywhere in the queendom you will know what the Panniers is like. They are all the same.

Same hotel lobby decor, same food, same prices. The only thing to tell you you are not in Nottingham or Norwich is the local accents of the many punters.

The beer was superb, as good as a good rub down in an ice house by a crackling wood blaze while the huskies keep guard against the glacier pirates. I had a crisply glorious pint of Smoky Joe. My friend had a soothing draft of something dark and powerful. He was satisfied with it and it made him philosophical. As we sat and talked - mostly about babies - I noticed we were surrounded by adults of all ages, most of whom were eating curry from metal pots. If I had been tiresome enough to ask them how often they came here, they might have said: "every week".

If you are interested in good, low priced ale, the Panniers is a perfect hostelry. Cheap grub too. Probably tastes quite nice. And, you know, I hate the place.

I hate it because it is the bland pub universe cousin of a corporate fast food chain outlet. The place has a sort of psychic anti-character impact on the space it contains, with its school dining hall ambiance. There is no sense of community. Good pubs make you feel like you could own them, in some vicarious customer way, if you were a regular.

In terms of character alone, look at a pub I have wrote about before on this blog: The Reform Inn, in Pilton. It doesn't sell cheap curry and it does not welcome children or have a wide variety of the finest beers known to man and beast. But in all its eccentric, even ugly, brilliance, the local boozer offers a rare sanctuary from the blanding-out influence of the boardroom folk. What choice we have left is debatable. But there are still good local pubs who deserve our custom, even if it's just £3 a week.

We drinkers vote with our pint pots and our wine glasses, and the Panniers was as full as can be on Thursday last week. The beancounters will tell you this success was proof of armour against the ill wind blowing through the economy.

I kept thinking of my ideal pub.

Please go to the North Country Inn (an incantation)

I can't expect you to respond,

But please go to the North Country Inn.

The pub has solid walls and wooden window frames.

Please go to the North Country Inn.

The staff are friendly and the beer is in a cask, if you want it.

Please go to the North Country Inn.

I ate a cheeseburger there - and chips.

Please go to the North Country Inn.

The cheeseburger was good and better than the mean filth served up in those fast food places that make so much money; you know: lifeless formica hellpits copied from US suburbs, where it's always sunny, at least in the movies, not like here.

Please go to the North Country Inn, instead.

I can't expect you to comply,

But please go to the North Country Inn.

The furniture is pubby, not trendy trash from retail sheds, without history and memories of drink digressions and nicotine.

Please go to the North Country Inn.

You won't feel like a cog in a businessman's feeding game.

Not at the North Country Inn.

In a world of plastic windowframes, there is hope.

In a world of designer bars half-designed badly by bad half-blind maniacs,

I can't expect you to respond.

Please go to the North Country Inn.

THE NORTH COUNTRY INN, MERMAID WALK, BARNSTAPLE

ADAM'S ALE RATING: 3 OUT OF 5

DRINK THIS: OTTER ALE

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

Indecorous eccentrics and eccentric decor (an unexpected encounter in a fine public house)

One cooling summer dusk I found myself, energised by a sweet spicy dinner and a few kitchen ales, bundling into the Reform Inn, where yeasty pot-wallopers were stood on wooden chairs, screaming to the ends of their lungs through tobacco smoke.

It was almost 11pm and I wanted to look around my new "local". On that distant evening three years ago, I was unprepared.

An emotional and physical weakling would have fled, I told myself, so I shuffled through the blur to the bar, where I was greeted by a silver-haired gentleman bristling with a stripe of friendliness more usually reserved for the leprous thief. Yes, I was a thirsty stranger too close to closing time, who had neither the elbows for pool nor the eyebrows for darts...you know those special targeted brows...

But no matter. I got my pint of Barum Original above the yowling and through the haze I tried to analyse my amazing environment. Everything seemed somehow too luminous, too...yellow...orange...but worn in. This was unlike any public house I had ever visited.

I registered the pleasingly eccentric decor and the pleasingly indecorous eccentrics, some of whom were wobbling about on chairs, brow-furrowed with exertion. They were screaming sounds...words...song lyrics.

The song Livin' On A Prayer by 1980s permhead rockers Bon Jovi, was being screamed as, and acted out as, Standin' On A Chair. Not every night did this happen, I learned; that would be a bit much. But the singalong, a dead pleasure in most pubs, or a pleasure brutalised in to delusional carcrasheeokee, had not perished in the Reform.

Comfortable in my new tangerine/soft rock/real ale club for singing eccentrics, I drank my pint of Barum Original, which is made in a shed in a yard behind the pub. Original is superior home brew, perhaps not as light and sophisticated as some other Devon beers, but with an earthy personality and a certain puppyish moreishness. Some of my friends claim Barum is "rough as dogs", and I know what they mean, even if they are wrong. It is an acquired taste and I acquired it.

As I digested my first pint that evening, the evening dissolved in conversations. Three years after that first visit, and after 18 months away from North Devon, I went to the Reform and spent an hour talking to a man I had never met before. That doesn't happen everywhere.

The Reform is not a venue for cappucino, wi fi, student cocktails, designer lager, or brunch. But if you have a belly for beer, and a brain for conversation, the Reform is your man.

THE REFORM INN, PILTON STREET, BARNSTAPLE

ADAM'S ALE RATING: 4 out of 5

DRINK THIS BEER: BARUM ORIGINAL (4.4 %)

Barum Brewery website

Permhead rockers

Pilton's Green Man Festival