Good evening!
After an early morning appointment with the vampire nurse at the surgery as part of the annual diabetic review, followed by a trip to the local builders merchants to discuss pivot door shower enclosures, to celebrate the first day after the end of the holiday season
, Mrs O and I made a break for the coast!
After the usual interminable crawl through Sandford to Wareham, we meandered on to Corfe Castle, which is stunning, and then turned right and headed up to the top of the cliffs at Worth Matravers, where there is an award-winning CAMRA pub called the Square and Compass. We parked up in the parish council car park, which was plastered with notices to pay £2 parking or suffer keel-hauling, but there was no pay 'n display machine, and we eventually found a metal honesty box tucked away in an ancient stone pillar just inside the entrance!
We walked down to the pub, which was one of the most peculiar places we've ever discovered down here. You queue up in a gloomy corridor for the hatch, which dispenses any number of beers or ciders, but the food menu consists of (a) cheese and vegetable pie (b) beef pasty or (c) pot of olives. And that's it!
Still, all very efficiently dispensed but what it must be like in the height of the season, I dread to think. There was a funny smell in the place, nobody was sitting in either of the two small rooms that seemed to be furnished out of the Poldark era, and probably hadn't been used since then either
. Clutching our olive pots, we sat outside on a bench made out of a giant stone slab, at a table also a giant stone slab. and watched small white-sailed yachts scudding westwards towards Weymouth Bay. Absolutely idyllic in the warm sunshine ….. rather a memorable location and visit!
