Thursday 2 June: BELMONT, BURNHAM GREEN (Malcolm Allen, Mike Horsman, Andrew Swift)
COMMENT: This was half a visit to what is halfway to being a pub. We had called off this week's original destination, the Cowper Arms at Letty Green, because there wasn't a quorum but Andrew, Malcolm and myself got shot of prior commitments early enough to go to the Belmont for lunch. It's an oddity. In the middle of the Hertfordshire countryside it is essentially a French-style wine bar. It does serve perfectly respectable beer and the food was good, but to me it felt peculiar. I like pubs and this wasn't really a pub. However, any establishment which serves the right kind of beer deserves support and if there is a market for their approach, good luck to them.
Probably it felt odder because most Odyssey participants will remember when it was the Duck, an old fashioned boozer originally built in the 1840s to provide drink for the navvies who built the Digswell Viaduct (a brickfield for the viaduct was set up at Burnham Green). When I knew it, in the 1990s, it was less basic but definitely a community pub in which some Odyssians had many legendary evenings with the then landlord, Mick Bruce. Not for me to tell the stories!
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