Travelogue Ireland, July 2011 – Day One: North Wales
Or… Part One: Striking Gold in Conwy
Our recent trip to Ireland started with a trek across sunny North Wales to the ferry port at Holyhead. The weather was glorious and the M62 / M60 / M6 / M56 / A55 route not too horrendously busy (Wednesday lunchtime must be a good time to travel, or we just struck lucky) and I’d already done the research and picked out a place for lunch en-route: the White Lion Inn, in the middle of the village of Llanelian, up in the hills above Old Colwyn and Colwyn Bay.
Very nice place indeed: as you can see, what looks like a couple of cottages from the outside actually opens up into a converted barn or church hall that serves as the dining area for a country pub (complete with misc farming paraphenalia) that, judging by the number of covers in the place, must do a roaring trade on a Sunday lunchtime. The food was hearty and generously portioned. I had the Somerset chicken – roast bird with bacon and cheese in a cider, mushroom, rosemary and thyme sauce, with big chips – washed down with a pint of Brakspear Hooray Henley; a very pale, golden summer ale with a decent hop-profile for its decidedly session-ABV of 4.0%.
Three other taps offered a choice of other Marston’s brews: Pedigree, Burton Bitter and one other (maybe Brakspear bitter, maybe Oxford Gold). The landlord and landlady were both friendly as well, happy to stop by our table for a chat, seeing as the place was reasonably quiet, and pleased to hear that we’d specifically swung by after finding their pub on BeerintheEvening.com. Very nice place, well worth a detour from the dual carriageway if you’re in the area.
After lunch we continued down the road to Conwy, to stretch our legs and enjoy the sunshine while it lasted. Conwy is home to one of the finest medieval castles in Britain, as well as the Conwy Brewery. Alas, we didn’t have quite enough time for a visit to the former and as I was driving I couldn’t really go hunting for produce from the latter. But we did make a pleasantly unexpected discovery in the middle of Conwy, in the form of Vino Mondo.
As Jo and I wandered up High Street, my eye was caught by a couple of 500ml beer-shaped bottles in the window of what was ostensibly a wine emporium, so we popped in for a closer look. Inside we discovered about a dozen shelves stacked with a very good selection of bottled beers indeed: plenty from Welsh breweries such as Purple Moose and Breconshire, as well a good selection of English and Scottish brews that you don’t see in the big supermarkets and a few interesting-looking US imports as well.
The owners were both happy to chat about the beers and told us about a beer tasting event that they’re running in August (suggesting they’re equally pro-beer as they are pro-wine, which is a Good Thing). Jo and I left with a few bottles (all I could fit in my rucksack) including a Williams Bros Fraoch (one of Jo’s favourites), a Hook Norton Double Stout, a Great Orme Welsh Black and something called Tickle Brain from the Burton Bridge brewery. Great little bottle shop; definitely well worth a visit if you’re in the area for a day-trip or a holiday, or like us are just passing through en-route to the ferry.
After that, we got back on the A55 and made our way to Holyhead, via the Britannia Bridge across the Menai Straits. We checked into our guest house and wandered down into town to kill the evening. We managed to find a good place for food, one that even had a bottle of Bishop’s Finger to offer to accompany the chili chicken salad, but after that we completely struck out on the finding decent ale front. I’d go so far as to conclude that Holyhead is a cask desert. I asked one barman and he cheerfully told me that there wasn’t a pint of cask to be found anywhere in town. Even the one Marston’s pub we saw only had keg pumps (Marston’s Smooth? We didn’t hang around long enough to find out.)
I suppose it’s fair enough, what with the prohibitive cost of transporting cask ale all the way to the very tip of North-West Wales if there’s only one or two customers for the stuff, but with a growing number of independent Welsh breweries plying their trade in the area, you’d think someone would stock them? Anyhow, not fancying a pint of something creamy, and not wanting to resort to drinking Guinness this close to Ireland unless we were actually in Ireland, dammit, we legged it back to base for a cup of tea instead and rested up for the next day’s crossing.
Next up: Ireland part one…
