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Jul 29 2012

The Old Swan Inn – Gargrave

With us starting and finishing today’s ramble in Airton, we had to find an alternative location for a post-walk bevvy, as we had happened upon a Yorkshire village without a juicer, if you can believe that. We therefore headed back down the road a few miles to Gargrave, and had a choice as on the A65 there’s a pub on the main road at either end of the town.

We pulled into the Anchor first, the car park was heaving, and a sign on the door said guide dogs only...well we had our latest Badger, Isabel (the dog) in tow again today, and we couldn’t sit in the beer garden as it was lashing it down intermittently, so we passed on the Anchor and moved onto the Old Swan Inn.

Well first box ticked was that dogs were welcome! It wasn’t the busiest as Kinder’s arrival, as the first punter in that day, prompted the landlady to have to stop doing her ironing behind the bar! Straightforward draught offerings at the bar, and none of the exotic local brews usually found in Dales hostelries, but they had Strongbow so I was happy, and the Carlsberg Cold sufficed for Sir Edmund and Ramblo. Holly and Wu Tang settled for the J2O, and with an obligatory bag of Scampi Fries thrown in for good measure, Sir Edmund parted with a few pennies shy of 15 notes.

Couldn’t see chips on the snacks menu, but when Sir Edmund enquired, they would be happy to do a couple of bowls at £2.50 a go. This pleased the girls, so much so that Ramblo offered to pay! She took that long rattling around her pockets however that Sir Edmund ended up squaring this bill up too…

The pub was more like a house, with the bar area being in the back room, and we went and grabbed a table in the snug at the front. Sir Edmund browsed over a copy of the Towpath Talk (as the Leeds and Liverpool canal goes through Gargrave as we Trailtrekkers well know!) as we carried out the usual guess the mileage game for today’s walk.

It seemed a quirky little place, and the landlady didn’t appear to be overly enamoured with having customers in, bizarrely?? But once the chips turned up, the girls faces lit up. The chips were chunky, looked homemade, and I wouldn’t go as far as to say they were gourmet, but they were polished off in no time. Sir Edmund even suggested they may qualify for the “l’Autobus gourmet chunky chip seal of approval window sticker” (watch this space!)

The landlady’s dog walker/husband came back with two very wet dogs, and we actually saw a smile cross her face too.

Nice place, we may have just caught the landlady on a bad day (I suppose it was because she had the ironing to do).

Review submitted by

Beaky

 

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