As good as pub food gets: The Red Lion, East Chisenbury, reviewed

The Red Lion, East Chisenbury, is in the Pewsey Vale on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Wiltshire’s strangeness surpasses even Cornwall and its menhirs: it has the greater volume of ghosts. I once spent an eerie day in Imber, the deserted village on the plain – the inhabitants were given 47 days’ notice to leave in November 1943, so American soldiers could shoot up Imber in preparation for invading Normandy. Its church of St Giles, perfectly maintained, is open one day a year in September. Its pub, the Bell Inn, was sold to the Ministry of Defence, and is not a fine restaurant with rooms but a red-brick ruin, with the glass of the windows shot out: Daphne du Maurier’s ideal, the Manderley of pubs.

The Red Lion, though, is alive and looks normal: it is long, wonky, charming and thatched. My companion says you can’t thatch buildings for 30 years these days: the straw is of insufficient quality. (This is his obsession.) There is a preening red lion on an exterior wall, and a car park in which people jostle for space in some great metaphor for the state of rural housing.

Wiltshire is the native land of pigs, ghosts – the real Wolf Hall is here, unrenovated and fascinating – and moon-rakers: locals told customs men they were looking for the moon in the pond when caught retrieving goods, and customs men believed them, which is offensive. (My husband is a Wiltshire man, a moon-raker, and he thinks lardy cake, which should be bought from the award-winning Marshalls in Pewsey, is a cake, though it isn’t. It’s a bread which his father ate daily, and in secret.) But this is the soft and monied part.