Shepton Mallet

The Swan (formerly Butterfles Wine Bar)

Happy New Year

It has become a tradition in our house that on New Year’s Day after the festivities of Christmas have died down and all the mince pies eaten, we give each other one final gift. This gift is not an ordinary gift, there is a rule, it must be pre-owned (which usually means purchased from a charity shop).

My gift from Hannah this year was a 21 year old book entitled ‘Somerset Pub Walks’ by Enid Byford which she bought from the Oxfam shop in Wells somehow under my nose without me noticing.

Flicking through the book on New Year’s Day we began to wonder how different these pubs and their walks would be now. Would they still exist? Would any still have the same landlord? How might the menus have changed?

With the added incentive of each of the walks involving a visit to a pub and the chance to use our newly refurbished VW Campervan ‘Bella’ for some fun trips, we formulated a plan to do each of the walks visiting each of the pubs (where they still existed) attempting to do one per weekend in 2014 until they were all done.

The following day being my last day off before returning to work we decided to pop into The George Inn, Wedmore (not one of the pubs in the book) for a pint and a bowl of chips. As the six of us sat around the wood burner on the comfy leather sofa in the corner Hannah and I returned to our plan for visiting the 30 pubs in the book. We decided at that point that it would be fun to blog about each of these mini adventures noting observations about how things had changed in 21 years.

So that’s what this is all about. We have no idea if anyone will read our blog, it will just be a fun thing to do in 2014 and that’s enough for us.