September 2026. Headcorn. Kent.
Only an hour in Headcorn, strategically tucked between Ashford, Maidstone, and Mrs RM (and Shane MacGowan’s) birthplace in Pembury.
An hour is enough to visit the White Horse, walk the length of both sides of the High Street, and diligently bring your readers views of the Church Walk around St Peter and St Paul.
In the stained glass within we see St Simon of BRAPA pleading for minimal churn in the new Beer Guide.
I’m more taken in the official church mascots.
Headcorn isn’t overpubbed. I consider a pre-emptive tick in the beautiful George (it’s lost its “and dragon” carelessly),
but the lone hand pump is turned around, and I really don’t want Madri (no offence to Spaniards).
Instead I pop in Tap 17 next door, fulfilling a promise I made two years ago.
These days there’s plenty of small pubs without any interest in real ale, and that’s fine, but it’s unusual for a purely keg micro to just take the craft beers of respected cask brewers like Kent and Moot. It’s not a line-up to wow Stafford Paul, I suspect.
The welcome at the bar from the young staff couldn’t have been friendlier, the Kent Five Hop was cool and tasty, and in the garden a young lad’s phone burst into embarassing life as he forgot the volume button.
“I was only looking at the pasta recipes !” he pleaded, but we’d rumbled him.
In a random pub you just want something, anything to happen, and involuntary embarassment always delivers.
More interesting than the poster for the talk on Parisian traitors at the station, anyway.
Tap 17, majoring in craft murk, by the looks of it. Fortunately, Paulaner Helles saves the day, as evidenced by the photo from the garden/outdoor drinking area.
I haven’t visited this micro, and on my last visit to Headcorn, wasn’t overly impressed with the G&D either, as I gather you weren’t. I’m sure there was at least one decent pub, at the other end of the High Street, but it’s probably a very desirable, second-home, these days.
Interesting conversation this afternoon, in the Gardener’s Arms, Lewes. Pleased to know that other drinkers share my disdain of hazy beers.
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Josephine Baker and Suzanne Spaak were distinguished members of the Resistance. To my surprise, Edith Piaf didn’t come out of things particularly well and the less said about Coco Chanel the better.
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“An hour is enough to visit the White Hart” and I learnt yesterday that nearly two hours is more than enough for the Greyhound at Burston. I had walked along the Trent and Mersey towpath from Great Haywood towards Stone passing the last known surviving inland saltmarsh in the British Isles and stopping off for a pint in the Saracens Head, Weston and the Dog and Doublet, Sandon. With it raining as I reached Burston I decided to use the new usually-hourly 151 bus but just missed the 1.19 and had to wait for the 3.29pm. Before the train home from Stone I got in my tenth and eleventh pubs there this month. Use them or lose them.
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So you’re saying it’s merely a quirk of fate that the world missed out on the Mrs RM fronted Pogues? I now have the mental image of the pair of you doing “Fairytale…..”
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Martin, I should have read your first post on Headcorn, before commenting on this one. Then I would have remembered that the White Horse is the pub at the other end of Headcorn.
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