18th January 2020
I hope these dates I’m sticking up help in your appreciation of my epic journey.
Once I finish the Cornwall trip there’s just a write-up of a messy 3 days in West Yorkshire and Manchester and I might just finish that in time for the January Stocktake but don’t set your clocks by it.
“Keep driving ! Keep driving !” said Sis as we passed Launceston, which isn’t that bad, if you enter the city walls at nighttime with a guard.
The islands apart, Devon is my biggest challenge to GBG completion before I die (posthumous completion is an interesting prospect).
Plymouth and Exeter aside, it’s very bitty, and even those two cities seem determined to rotate entries relentlessly.
Driving through on the A30 and M5 you don’t pass a great deal, but Sis kindly said she’d help me tick the Blue Lion at Lewdown, about which I knew nothing.
Wiki tells me “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in 825 a battle was fought involving the Westwealas (Cornish) and the Defnas (men of Devon) at Gafulforda near Lewdown”.
I assumed the battle was over a can of Verdant Putty DIPA being smuggled over the border,
but further research reveals it follow a stamped to get out of local “comedian” Jethro’s club before he took the stage.
On the edge of Dartmoor but avoiding the worst of the Chiswick summer invasion, its setting is as plain as the pub itself.
Oddly, I didn’t take a picture of the outside of the Blue Lion,
but as they say it’s the inside that counts. I think that’s what they say.
I can sum the pub up in one photo.
Well, two.
OK, OK, just for Old Mudgie, the pub cat and dog shot.
Decent seating, young and old, village chat, sports TV, decent coffee and the dregs of a decent half of Sunshine that Sis awarded a 3 and she’s never wrong on such serious matters.
Just a good village pub, one more tick on my slow but steady route to the edge of Devon.
If Duncan is the hare, I’m the tortoise.
Yes, press play on the video now.
retiredmartin 
Trip seems a trivial word for your efforts; Quest is more like it.
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“dog shot” – it certainly looks lifeless.
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Maybe, after you’re gone, your sons could take the urn of your ashes around any remaining unticked GBG pubs.
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I was rather hoping it would be the corpse.
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Or maybe something more constructive like
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/going-out/mums-back-behind-the-bar-981991
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Winter, an underrated time of the year to be travelling the UK. If pubs can maintain barrel turnover, the quality of the beer is always better than in summer and you’re away from the crowds. Some lovely photos, in the last posts Martin.
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Thanks, Morten.
I was lucky with the weather. Dry and sunny, as it often is.
Pubs that aren’t shifting a lot of cask in winter often don’t shift a lot in Summer either.
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Morten,
Yes, “away from the crowds” .except in the Jolly Sailor on a recent afternoon when it had about as many customers as all Macclesfield’s other pubs put together.
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“I love this shot”. From the look of that photo, I think you might already have died and gone to heaven.
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I did have a similar shot with better definition but that one captures “pub in middle of nowhere” better 😉.
I’ve stuck that other one at the top now 👍
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Well BRAPA could take your mumified remains on his quest but you’d undoubtably end up being left in a Brunning & Price outside Maidenhead. Nobody there would realise for at least months.
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You mean I could replace Martin the Owl? #lifegoals
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That’s it, thought of fondly, but not as beloved as this year’s GBG.
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A good solid village pub…would be a Marston’s boozer in Derbyshire
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Yes, they’d have taken it on, def.
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