retiredmartin

January 2026. Three Oaks. East Sussex.

Mrs RM has been manically “improving” her blog, waiting for the next parental crisis. She’s a perfectionist; I guess that why she chose me to marry.

Monday saw me in need of fresh air and a pub after a day of relentless drizzle in Rye Harbour, so I jogged (bad idea) to Rye station to catch the hourly train to Three Oaks 12 minutes away.

“Move to the front carriage” shouts the guard; the second stop our from Rye has a small platform barely big enough to have a surreptitious wee.

It does house a mural commemorating mushrooms,

and a rotting tree with its own fungi (or whatever).

Apart from our eponymous pub, there’s not much else to Three Oaks, seemingly a hamlet built to serve a railway station rather than vice versa, with the ancient church a mile away in Guestling.

Has this phone box been converted into climbing apparatus.

We’d driven past the pub the day before and thought “Oooh“,

interesting but a few too many signs ?

Living well outside a Good Beer Guide that can’t even accommodate the Ypres Castle, the Three Oaks is a must.

If only for a collection of tat to rival the Yew Tree in Cauldon.

I’m surprised to see a village pub even open at all on Mondays these days. This one is open all hours, with half a dozen drinkers engaged in conversation about Linda Lusardi.

Like nearly every pub in East Sussex, it’s Harvey’s plus two.

Sorry, Kent Prohibition, but I’m on a bit of a Sussex Best roll at the moment, and this will be an unexpected NBSS 4. Cool and rich, a rival for any pint in Lewes I reckon.

It’s £5.20, fair enough; I hand over a fiver and 20p and the barmaid gives the Old Boy the fiver she owed him. It’s how the world goes round.

It’s a little marvel of a pub,

my only regret is that I’m perched round the corner and a bit “out of the action”.

Mind you, the “robust” banter (almost entirely female driven) may have been too much for my sensitive tastes.

I must take Mrs RM back. She’ll love it.