A long-lost relative and a celebratory brew

Last Sunday lunchtime, I came across my first draught Coronation Ale. The beer in question was the imaginatively named, Coronation Ale, from Greene King, and I have to say it was very good. It's a shame I was driving as it's no exaggeration to say it was one of the best GK beers I've had in a long time. Coming in at 4%, the beer is described on Untappd as “An easy drinking and refreshing golden ale, with tropical fruit notes.” I won't disagree with that, and it’s evidence that a large brewer, such as GK, can turn out decent beer when they put their minds to it.

The pub where I enjoyed this beer, was the Cock Horse, in the village of Detling – just off (literally), the busy A249, as it descends the steep escarpment of the North Downs, just to the north of Maidstone. Detling is familiar territory to me, as I passed through the village back in October 2020, whilst walking the  North Downs Way. I'd  stayed overnight at Black Horse, in nearby Thurnham, so the Cock Horse wasn’t open when I passed by mid-morning. I'd called in a few times, when I lived in Maidstone, but that would have been three and a half decades previously..

So, apart from drinking Coronation Ale, what was I, and indeed the rest of the family, doing at the Cock Horse on Sunday lunchtime? As truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, I shall give a truthful answer – we were there to meet up with Mrs PBT’s long lost cousin. You can blame the Ancestry website, the one where you register, submit a small sample of your DNA (by spitting into a tube), post it off, and wait it to be analysed, and your DNA profile to be emailed back, in due course.

Eileen and I both had our profiles analysed some years ago, and to anyone interested in this sort of thing, or indeed curious about their genetic makeup, and hence their ancestry, it’s certainly well worth doing. Getting your DNA analysed can throw up some surprising results, as I discovered with mine - 60% from Southern England and North West Europe, with the remainder split in roughly equal portions, between Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, and Scandinavia. The Wales connection doesn’t surprise me, as my maternal grandmother came from Mountain Ash, in the Welsh valleys, but the Ireland and Scotland connections were totally unexpected.

I’m digressing here, as this is supposed to be about Eileen’s ancestry, and hers veered more towards Northern Europe and Scandinavia, with the wildcard being a small amount (1%), from Sardinia! Eileen took out a monthly subscription to ancestry, which means she gets much more regular updates than I do, but four or five months ago, she received a message from a person with a DNA match, close enough to be a first cousin. Contact was established, more so with this long-lost cousin’s wife, but because there are still other relatives living, who are not aware of this individual, or from which side of the family he originates, this is as far as the disclosure goes.

What I can reveal is that Eileen and I arranged to meet up with her new cousin, and his wife, and as they were staying relatively local, whilst visiting another member of their family, we chose the Cock Horse at Detling, as a suitable venue. It was less than 10 minutes’ drive from the hotel they were staying at, and it also offered a “lite bites” option alongside its main Sunday lunchtime menu. I’d been tasked with locating a pub with this option, but as I explained to my good lady wife, most pubs understandably want to capitalise on the Sunday lunchtime trade by offering the full roast or carvery options, complete with all the trimmings. "But you're the pub expert," I was told. Pub expert, possibly, but miracle worker, definitely not, but as proof that persistence sometimes pays off, I eventually came up trumps.

The Cock Horse stood out as one of the very few pubs with a baguette or jacket potato option, alongside the Sunday roast, and its close proximity to where Mrs PBT’s newly found relatives were staying, made it the ideal choice. The landlord had told me, over the phone, that whilst there were no tables available in the restaurant, we were welcome to find some space in the bar, and order what we liked from the “lite bites” menu. With fine weather making a long overdue appearance, many people were sitting out in the garden, so there was plenty of room in the bar when we arrived.

The meeting was a success, and we could tell, at a glance, exactly who Eileen’s long-lost cousin is related to. Furthermore, him and his wife were really nice people, so we will arrange a further meetup in the not-too-distant future. The pub also proved a good choice on a busy Bank Holiday weekend, as well as providing my first opportunity for a visit  moving away from Maidstone, nearly 40 years ago.The pub was friendly, welcoming and the food offering was good too. It was certainly busy last Sunday, with a full restaurant, and a packed garden as well.

Before bringing this article to a close, I want to touch very briefly on the subject of royal, celebratory ales. In the past, such beers proved immensely popular when brewed to mark various royal events, and thinking back to the late Queen’s Silver Jubilee, in 1977,  it seemed that just about every brewery in the land, irrespective of size, produced a special beer to mark the event. Almost without exception these beers were only available in bottled form. 25 years later, fewer celebratory beers were brewed to mark the monarch’s Golden Jubilee, and in 2012, fewer still appeared in honour of the Diamond Jubilee. Some of these might well have been draught, rather than packaged, but I didn’t give that much attention to the matter and might still have done the same with regard to the coronation of the new King. A quick browse of the shelves in Sainsbury’s, last Bank Holiday Monday, revealed a Coronation Ale as part of the store’s "Taste the Difference" range.

Coming in at 7.0% abv, this strong, rich ale seemed worthy of my attention, so I treated myself to a bottle. Priced at £2.25, for a 500ml bottle, and attractively packaged, the beer is brewed by Dorset brewers, Hall & Woodhouse, and to my mind at least, is produced at a more fitting strength for a bottled, celebratory beer. Photos on Untappd, show this beer to be quite dark in colour as well, so I shall look forward to cracking this one open, next weekend.

Several other brewers, including Abbey Ales, Chiltern, Elgood’s, Greene King, Mauldon’s, Timothy Taylor, Tring, plus Windsor & Eton have also brewed their own coronation brew, to mark the occasion, but there hasn’t exactly been a flood of these beers. So, worth sampling, should you come across one, but on the other hand not really worth going out of your way to track any of these down.

 

The “Valley of Vision”

After one of the driest February’s on record the following months of March and April have turned out to be the complete opposite, with more than enough rain to make up for February’s shortfall and surely enough now to see us through into summer. The water companies, of course, will insist that despite all the heavy rain, many reservoirs are still only partially full, but I get the impression they are pulling our collective legs. If they worked instead, to repair countless leaks affecting the water supply system, then I'm sure there will be no water shortage.

So, what to do on a wet Friday when your wife has got a load of tax vouchers to issue? Don’t ask, but Mrs PBT’s does bookkeeping for a rather disparate group of jobbing builders, and at certain times of the year these “tradesmen” need to let HMRC know how much they’ve earned and what they are allowed to offset against tax.

That’s my take on it, and I might well be wrong, but it’s a task that requires a lot of concentration, so when my dear lady wife is up to her neck in financial matters, I’m better off out of the way. So, with me at loose end I decided to head off through the rain to somewhere I could enjoy some decent scenery and a nice quiet pub where I could enjoy a pint or two of beer.

For some reason the village of Shoreham sprang to mind, and I'm talking here about the Kent village of Shoreham rather than the better-known Shoreham-by-Sea, on the South Coast. The Kentish Shoreham nestles in the floor of the valley scoured out by the River Darent.  The latter is a fairly small river but is responsible, over the millennia for carving this valley deep into the chalk hill of the surrounding North Downs.

  According to Wikipedia, just over 2,000 souls live in Shoreham, but if you walk down into the village from the railway station, higher up in the valley, you get the feeling that the inhabitants have all disappeared. With the settlement hidden away in the floor of the valley, this is an easy assumption to make, despite proximity to the M25 and Sevenoaks, which is only a few miles away. I've been to Shoreham several times previously, either as part of a download walk or because there was some CAMRA related event taking place. Most of these involved arriving by train, and then walking to the Crown, which is the furthermost pub at the northern end of the village, and then work our way back towards the station, visiting the other pubs on the way. There used to be four public houses in Shoreham, but with the closure of the Two Brewers in 2019, there are now only three.

This time around, the pub I wanted to visit, was the Samuel Palmer, a rather upmarket gastro pub. Formerly known as Ye Olde George Inn. The pub was quite often missed, due to time restraints regarding last train home, so for this reason, along with the change of name, the Samuel Palmer was the obvious choice for an overdue visit. 

The pub is now owned by the nearby Mount Vineyard, who have spent a considerable sum renovating and smartening the place up (within the bounds of its listing). A courtyard/terrace area has been opened up, behind the building, and in spite of its upmarket theme, dogs are welcome both there and in the main bar, although not in the main restaurant or function rooms. Situated right at the southern entrance to the village, the pub’s new name relates to the 19^th Century, artist Samuel Palmer.  Taking his inspiration from what he referred to as this North Downs “Valley of Vision”, Palmer moved into a rundown cottage in the centre of the village, where he produced some of his best pastoral paintings - In a Shoreham Garden and A Cornfield by Moonlight, both in watercolours, for those who are interested in art.

My journey to Shoreham that Friday, involved a change of train at Sevenoaks station, and then a short ride of just three stations to the village. The rain had stopped by the time I alighted from the train, and after crossing to the opposite platform, I followed the off-road, gravel path which leads down in to the village. A walk through the churchyard, along a path lined on both sides with rows of carefully clipped yew bushes, brought me out opposite the Samuel Palmer, but I wanted to do a spot of exploring first, and then have a pint.

As I followed the narrow lane, past the pub and then down towards the centre of Shoreham, I could hear the sound of rushing water. Reaching the bottom of the slope and turning the corner, led me to the source of the noise, namely the fast-flowing River Darent, its waters swollen by the recent heavy rains. The river is crossed by a narrow bridge, and not far from there, on the left-hand side of the road, I could see the King’s Arms, the second of Shoreham’s three pubs.  It’s an attractive looking, white-painted building, and I was going to pop in for a pint, and to refresh my memory, but spotting the group of people standing outside, made me realise a funeral wake was taking place inside, so not wishing to intrude, I gave up on the idea, and instead headed back to the Samuel Palmer.

I had a quick look at the painter’s former cottage, which looked far from the rustic, rundown, rural idyll I was expecting, and a few minutes later, set foot inside the pub that bares the artist’s name. I’ve been having a spot of bother with the camera on my phone. The memory is approaching saturation point, which means that not all photos are loading correctly. Unfortunately, this means there aren’t that many photos of the Samuel Palmer’s interior, so “bear with” as they say, but what the few photos I did manage to take, don’t reveal, is the scale of what’s inside.

There are plenty of exposed old beams, an open fireplace to the left, and a couple of cosy, wood-panelled rooms. Further round is a bright and spacious restaurant area which, judging by the height of the open-plan pitched roof, must be a recent addition. Of much more interest to me than the architecture, was the presence on the bar of a hand-pump dispensing Larkin’s Best Bitter, which was a rare sight indeed. I say rare, because the 4.4% Best Bitter, brewed by Larkin’s is hardly ever seen in local pubs, most of which prefer to stock the weaker, and to my mind, inferior Traditional. At 3.4% abv, the latter is a full percentage point lower in strength than the Best, and this is reflected in both the body and the taste of the beer.

Larkin’s founder, the now sadly deceased Bob Dockerty, always claimed that “Trad” as it is known in the trade, was popular in rural pubs, due to its low strength. Drinkers could enjoy a couple of pints of this beer, and then drive home, safe in the knowledge they were unlikely to fail the breathalyser. This may well have been the case, but for those times when you are NOT driving, Trad fails to satisfy, and is not really the beer for those who like a bit of body in their beer. Imagine my excitement then as the barman pulled my rich, foaming, and full-bodied pint of Larkin’s Best, and I’m pleased to report it tasted every bit as good as it looked, but it was £5.25 a pint!

I sat at a table, opposite the bar enjoying my beer, and taking in the sights and the comings and goings in the pub. Diners, whether sitting in the bar area, or in the more upmarket section at the back, appeared to make up the majority of the Samuel Palmer’s customers, but there were a few casual drinkers – dog walkers, or the occasional rambler. I only stayed for the one pint, before making the walk, back up the hill to Shoreham station, but I enjoyed my visit to this upmarket pub, and  I especially enjoyed my pint of Larkin’s Best.