retiredmartin

September 2024. Barnsley.

£8.60 it had cost me for the rail return to Barnsley. Not THAT bad, it’s £58 (fifty-eight) to Atherstone, which has zero GBG entries but does have the Paul Mudge seal of approval, which will no doubt be all have to direct us to the best pubs when CAMRA dies as ageing organisations always will.

Paul wouldn’t give his seal of approval to many of Barnsley’s GBG pubs, and frankly I wasn’t that enamoured by a return visit to the pubs formerly known as Tipsy Cow, the cask bar holding up the town’s mighty Gateway Plaza.

Now it’s Nailmaker’s Tap 2. DON’T ask where Tap 1 is.

I didn’t have to go back to a pub re-opened under new ownership.

But then, the rules of Good Beer Guide ticking are notoriously personal. Some only go back if the bar has moved position by more than 3 feet, some insist on a pint in each pub, some are still ticking the 1987 edition even though half the pubs are dead.

I was glad to go back, more so when I just realised that 2021 trip was during Covid restrictions (Volume 4), which presumably explains why there were no internal pics.

Anyhow, it’s tiny outside, you’re probably better off in the South Yorks sunshine, drink a Nailmaker Clout which was tasty but could have done with a bit more turnover.

That cask turnover wasn’t coming from a couple of students on cider, or a bloke who saw Whitesnake in Barnsley in 1978, years before the town’s pubs made Connect 4 compulsory.

I would love to have done a pub crawl of Barnsley in 1978, but I fear I never shall.