Entering the New Inn in Llanddewi Brefi in Ceredigion is like stepping back in time. The only pub in the village (since the Foelallt Arms closed down four years ago), The New Inn seems to hail from the 1970s. Its till is a pull-out wooden drawer full of coins and notes. There’s a coal fire in the grate. The bar is littered with eccentric and old-fashioned clutter: a jar of pickled eggs, boxes of Swan Vestas as if smoking in pubs was still the norm, plaques to award the winners of a conker competition long past, sheep farming memorabilia.
The clientele are dressed as if they’ve just got back from marching down Whitehall with Jeremy Clarkson. And, it transpires, these drinkers are waiting to be fed. A table is being set with plates of steaming faggots, roughly mashed potato, jugs of thin brown gravy and plates of cheap sliced white bread thickly buttered and cut into triangles.
However, if you had actually come here in the 1970s, it might have been more colourful still: the New Inn, I discover, was the base for members of the gang producing most of the LSD that powered Dark Side of The Moon-era hippie culture in the UK – before they were nicked by undercover police in Operation Julie, what was then the biggest drugs bust in European history.
And I used the phrase ‘Only… in the village’ advisedly – Llannddewi Brefi is also the setting for the sketch about Wales’s most isolated gay man in Little Britain, a show which also now feels like it comes from a departed world. (Fans used to steal the ‘Welcome to…’, signs apparently.)
If you like this sort of thing – and I very much do – it’s charming. And quite a find. But you won’t find it in any of those ‘The 50 best rural/walkers’/quaint pubs in Britain’ lists beloved of the broadsheet weekend supplements. I only stumbled on the obscure New Inn thanks to my favourite app, the Good Beer Guide, a free resource courtesy of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale.
Perhaps unsurprisingly with that provenance, this app is unlikely to win tech innovation awards any time soon, but it’s perfectly functional and it has one feature that makes it an invaluable resource for the UK traveller: ‘pubs near me’. Let it know your location and it will let you know your boozer options by distance.
For years I have carried a well-thumbed copy of The Good Pub Guide in my car’s glove compartment – as I mentioned in a previous piece about the joy of finding an unmessed-with pubs. But although that guide’s listings are as good, if not better, recently I have been using the Good Beer Guide app more and more because of that ‘near me’ function.
It has helped me find any number of delightful boozers when on the road. Recent examples include the Viper at Mill Green in Essex, the Painters Arms in Luton, the Lordship Arms at Benington in Hertfordshire, King of the Belgians in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the Old House at Ightham Common, Kent, the Bell Inn at Aldworth in Berkshire and the Lord Crewe Arms at Blanchland, Northumberland – all relatively unheralded gems.
It also took me to another little marvel in the middle of nowhere on that recent trip to Wales – the fabulous Ffynnone Arms. The Ffynnone (try saying that after three pints of Rev. James) is located in obscure farming country in the hinterland between Cardigan and Carmarthen, and is also like stepping back in time, but this time to the 1980s.
In my younger days, while I quaffed industrially-brewed lager, or later ‘craft’ pale ale, I was a little sceptical of real ale enthusiasts, filing them alongside Morris dancers as harmless but misguided. Lately I have come to realise that I was the misguided one and that a pint of cask ale from a decent brewer is the best pub drink that there is. So, naturally, the pubs that make a virtue of serving the stuff tend to be better too.
A pint of cask ale from a decent brewer is the best pub drink that there is. So, naturally, the pubs that make a virtue of serving the stuff tend to be better too
As if to underline the point, on this same Welsh trip I also went out of my way to visit another pub, this time one not found via CAMRA’s app but touted in the Times as one of ‘23 cosy pubs’. I do find these newspaper lists useful too, and fun – and goodness knows they are better than relying on the dire Tripadvisor – but you tend to see the same places featured over and over again. That Times cosy list, for example, included the Gunton Arms in Norfolk, the Felin Fach Griffin in Powys and the Beckford Arms in Wiltshire – all pubs I know and love, but all also staples of this kind of media acclaim. However the pub we were travelling to visit on this occasion, the Forest Arms in Brechfa, Carmarthenshire, was an exception – a newcomer to such national recognition. I say this with some authority as I used to drink there fairly regularly many years ago. I was even friends with a previous landlord. So its name in the article leapt out at me and I was keen to see how it had changed since I was last there.
I found that it remains a very fine pub. It’s been tastefully modernised, it’s clearly made great strides with its food, it’s undeniably cosy as billed, and yet… it didn’t quite hit the mark the way the New Inn had.
Perhaps this was down to the sense of surprise and delight I’d experienced in Llanddewi Brefi the previous day rather than because of any failing of the Forest Arms. But that feeling of being miles from home and driving down winding lanes with an intermittent signal to try to track down a real ale pub with no national profile in the hope that it may be a proper cracker is the closest I will ever get to being Indiana Jones. The Good Beer Guide app is the key to being able to try.
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