Drink
It's not long since I was trumpeting the wonders of the true country pub so, back in Yorkshire for the weekend, I decide to revisit the Falcon in Arncliffe, in the heart of the Dales. There can be only a handful of pubs in the land that retain such character and tradition.
As a child, I had to tramp for at least ten miles across muddy fields, up and down steep hills and over dry-stone walls before I was allowed the solace of shelter from the driving rain and the reward of a glass of Coca-Cola. So it is with great glee that my latest love and I glide up to the Falcon in his racing-green convertible MG, which we park defiantly right outside the door. How disgusted my father, with whom I walked the 24 miles of the Three Peaks at the tender age of seven, would be.
Entering this charming ivy-clad stone cottage of a pub on the edge of the village green, I note the sign on the door requesting us to "leave the Pennine Way outside" and revel in my blissful idleness. The inside is slightly less welcoming than I recollect. Perhaps it takes a ten-mile walk, bone-chilling cold and blisters to find it cosy, but there is, nevertheless, something appealing about the stark decor. The Falcon has been run by the Miller family for 200 years. Let's just say that they haven't succumbed to any new-fangled ideas about how pubs should be.
The bar is barely more than a plank. There are old prints and a stuffed fish in a case on the wall. There is beer in kegs beneath the bar. There are some soft drinks placed resolutely on a shelf (as opposed to in a fridge) to keep them lukewarm. There are crisps (they are plain). There are some spirits, but I doubt anyone would dare to ask for them. My latest love surreptitiously removes his mobile phone from his jacket pocket, switches it off and replaces it.
"They don't work round 'ere," bellows the barman, immediately alerted by his keen antennae for the trappings of London types. "And if they did, you'd be out of that door." The last time I was here, two walkers were, quite rightly, bawled at for coming in purely to use the loo (a freezing place in a cement outhouse).
We order a couple of pints of bitter. It's Younger's Scotch, which the barman decants from the kegs into a china jug before pouring it into a pair of glasses. We watch in admiration. Will it taste any better than pumped ale?
"No," says the barman. "It's the same stuff. Except down south they unscrew the sprinkler on the taps, so it comes out even flatter." And if the bitter is kept in the cellar and pumped through to the bar, there's a greater chance that it will be stale, that your pint will be pulled from the beer lingering in the pipes or, if the landlord is lazy and doesn't clean the pipes properly, that the beer will suffer on the way up. The Falcon's bitter, by contrast, is beautifully kept - there's even a wire mesh on the inside of the tap to filter the sediment - and we think it tastes jolly good.
This is a fine Yorkshire pub where people mind their own business and sit supping their pints in companionable silence. Not everyone is welcome. Morris dancers are pretty much banned - "Right plonkers," says the barman, "up from Leeds way. They get in the way of tractors: we're trying to work and they bang their sticks against them." This caused something of a stir in the local papers, but the landlord, under pressure to admit the coaches of costumed stick-wavers celebrating something called Flag-cracking Weekend, slickly countered that morris dancing is a pagan practice that he could not tolerate in his Christian public house. To which the dancers had no response.
Luckily we are thoroughly enjoying our drinks. If we were to complain we'd get short shrift from this cussed landlord, who remains serenely oblivious to any opinions anyone may hold about his ale. As does his barman. "People can take it or leave it," he says as he takes a bite of a cheese and pickle sandwich and settles down with his after-hours pint. "We're not bothered."
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