The Old Stone House

In 1946, George Orwell described the perfect (urban) pub in terms that still resonate today. He argued that the country pub was different, but never elaborated on how. 78 years later, here’s my attempt at evoking the bucolic twin of the legendary Moon Under Water.

The Old Stone House doesn’t appear in tourist guides. You chance upon it by accident when Google Maps loses its signal and you miss a turning. If you’re looking for it specifically, for the first time, that can only be because you mentioned to someone that you were going to be in this part of the world, and they said in a hushed voice, “If you’re going there, you must find the Old Stone House. You’ll love it.”

There are tourists here – it’s a beautiful part of the country after all. Many are walkers. There are a couple of short, circular walks that pass the pub. Of course they do. But it’s also near a long trail that backpackers tackle over the course of a week or so. The Old Stone House would never be so twee as to hang a sign saying “Muddy Boots and Paws Welcome,” but you can instantly tell that this is the case. There are also locals, who remain here long after the weather has turned.

The Old Stone House isn’t picturesque. Despite the instinct to do so, there’s not much point photographing the building. It doesn’t have a thatched roof or flowers around the door. It’s not listed. It’s just solid and functional.

Inside, there’s no evidence that the last fifty years happened. No music, no WiFi, and definitely no television. When you look closely, you can see that the lights sport modern LED lightbulbs, but they’re so well-hidden it looks like gaslight.

There’s a big open fire at one end of the room. In winter, you have to be here at opening time to claim the table next to it. There’s also a large, shiny-seated wooden chair opposite. It’s the kind of chair you just know you don’t sit in unless you’ve been drinking here since the pub was built.

The walls and ceilings are decorated with random stuff – nothing as obvious as horse brasses or old black-and-white photos of the pub. A lot of the décor relates to the name of the pub (which isn’t really the Old Stone House.) But on top of that (sometimes literally) there’s a collection of old scythes. A bowsaw. A 1930s policeman’s helmet. A case full of arrows.

The Old Stone House is run by a family. They all work here. Some of them don’t look older than their teens, but present as lifelong publicans in their sixties who know every detail about cellarmanship, nearby breweries, farming, local and national politics, and every aspect of running a pub.

The food in the Old Stone House is basic but brilliant, hearty and homemade. The portions are huge – the kind of meals an exhausted backpacker might inhale before nodding off in their chair. The price of the fish and chips raised an eyebrow the first time you ordered it, but you’ve never been able to finish it. There’s a Ploughman’s that, as expected, comes with either cheese or ham. But because this is the perfect fantasy pub, you can pay a bit extra and have both. The only problem is that, with the Ploughman’s, the ham egg and chips, and the ham sandwiches, they always run out of ham if it’s busy. It’s gorgeous ham. And they’re always busy.

The Old Stone House is good for cider. It’s won the regional CAMRA branch Cider Pub of the Year more than once. The range of drinks on the bar is basic, but there are chalkboards for cider and cask ale. Ask about these, and after being quizzed about “What kind of thing do you normally like?” and making your choice, the member of staff will disappear for a couple of minutes – to the cellar, I’m guessing – and return with cool pints. The regular cask ales on the bar are old-school and boring, the kind of beers that are always slagged off by aficionados. But have them here, where they’re local and they sell fast, and they’re better than you ever thought they could be.

There is of course a beer garden outside the Old Stone House. Well, a field, really, across the track, with a few tables at the end closest to the pub, and cows grazing in the distance. There are also a couple of tables just outside the pub door, but these are always taken by the time you arrive. If you do get one, sitting there by the old red phone box (now a defibrillator station), listening to birdsong and the shushing breeze in the trees, you can imagine the odd spitfire flying overhead. (You always use this as a figure of speech to emphasise how timeless the pub is. But back in June, one actually did.)

In “The Moon Under Water,” this is the point where Orwell confesses that it’s “time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.” The clue was in the name: the “moon under water” is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. Orwell was telling us this from the start.

And that’s why the Old Stone House is different. I gave it that name precisely because it stands opposite to Orwell’s conceit. It’s real and solid, open for business as I write this, and it has every one of the qualities I just described. I checked when I had lunch there yesterday. (Jacket potato like they used to taste on bonfire night when you were a kid, with five-bean chilli, properly spicy.)

Promise to buy me a pint there, and one day I might tell you its real name.