The last time we were
in Askrigg, four years ago, we bypassed the Kings
Arms, opting instead to go a few hundred yards up
the road to the Crown, which we thought was wonderful,
because the Crown was down-to-earth and the Kings
Arms looked snooty. Give a pub a chance!
This turned out to be a
very nice pub, and I spent a couple of very pleasant
hours in here before Doris, all rested up, joined
me for the balance of the evening.
The main bar room
is a little too cavernous for my liking, and the food
blackboard, whilst doubtless appealing to many people,
yells 'Restaurant!!' to me. The cavernous nature of
the room can be explained by the fact that the pub
was built in 1760 as racing stables, was converted
to an inn in 1860 with the bar being converted from
the former tack room. It won the Yorkshire Life Hotel
of the Year award for 'outstanding culinary credentials
and highly individual period ambience'.
The menu was adventurous,
varied and (as it turned out) had several rather tasty
items on it too. They had also built a bay-windowed
area that hinted at being a mini-conservatory, the
bane of pub development.
But the little room where
we ended up was very pleasant indeed, all oak panels,
parquet floors and a nice Victorian fireplace. I started
on the Black Sheep Best, but they served it too cold,
and the move to the Black Bull Bitter was quite decidedly
a good one. The food, when it came, was in small portions,
but as Doris pointed out, we did only order starters
and dessert, and I would agree that the adventuresome
nature of the food was a welcome break from a run
of standard pub fare.
All in all, this was a
great evening, I thoroughly relaxed doing a little
reading and writing and watching people, and taking
all kinds of time over the beer, which I appreciated
as I always do. Some of the pub visits we have enjoyed
on this trip have been fleeting in the extreme, but
this one was leisurely indeed.
This was the 'Drovers
Arms' in the series 'All Creatures Great and Small',
a much-loved and long-running BBC series about a Yorkshire
Dales veterinarian in the 1930s. The whole village
was used as a backdrop, and some tourist business
is still done on the back of that program's success.
There is not much else
to say about Askrigg. With many other villages I can
happily go off on tangents about local history and
characters but this place had its roots in the textile
industry, then the BBC filmed here, then the tourists
came. There are some nice, proud-looking 17th and
18th Century buildings and even some rather nice waterfalls
nearby, but really not much to hold your rapt attention
for days on end.
As a footnote, the 250
villagers of Askrigg in the Dales are fighting to
prevent part of the Kings Arms being turned into holiday
flats, which they believe would ruin the atmosphere
of the lovely old building. I am not sure if they
were successful or not, but that certainly looks like
a couple of builders throwing stuff out of the upstairs
window in the main picture to this section.
