Walking to pubs has a habit of revealing things — odd details, half‑remembered histories, stories hiding in plain sight. They don’t always belong inside a pub entry, but they feel worth sharing. So here’s a place for the things I’ve noticed along the way. Hope you enjoy them.
By my calculation, I've walked into more than fifty churches, chapels, abbeys and cathedrals this year. And yet, if I'm honest, and there's something rather embarrassing about all this, I still don't really understand what I'm looking at.
If you stand in the courtyard of The Tower Inn at Slapton in South Devon and look up at the tower behind it, it's natural to assume you're looking at something religious — a chapel perhaps, or a piece of a monastery. It's neither, quite. It's the last standing fragment of a chantry college, and to understand why a college like that existed at all, and why it existed here, in a small Devon fishing and farming village rather than a cathedral city, you have to go back to one man: Sir Guy de Bryan, and the extraordinary reign he served under.
There’s a moment I keep coming back to.
People sometimes ask why I started Pubs Worth the Walk.
Walk around any old village — such as Sherston & Easton Grey on today's walk — and you’ll see those little plaques and guidebook notes announcing that a building is “Grade II” or “Grade II*”, as if everyone left school fluent in heritage jargon. Most of us nod politely and move on, none the wiser.
I didn’t set out to write about Hannah More this week. I was walking.
Walk through almost any town or village in Britain and you’ll find a pub called The Royal Oak. There are hundreds of them — more than 400 still trading — and the name isn’t random.
Many walkers are familiar with The Monarch’s Way without perhaps really knowing what it is. This long distance footpath snakes across Worcestershire, the Cotswolds, the Mendips, the South Coast — 615 miles of twists and detours that seem almost deliberately perverse. And in a way, they are.
