I recently paid a first-ever visit to Burton-on Trent, famous for being one of the spiritual homes of the British brewing industry, just as one of the stalwarts from the town announced it is exiting from brewing altogether.... As far as I can recall, I had never been to Burton-Upon-Trent before, the nearest I'd been was driving past the town on the A38, with the nearby site of the Marstons brewery with its clouds of steam rising into the sky a splendid spectacle. I have to say though that given Burton's pre-eminence in the history of the brewing industry, the fact that this was the first visit to the town for a beer writer is an admission of a serious omission, a dereliction of duty some might say. The original settlement that is now known as Burton-Upon-Trent, or Burton-on-Trent or just plain Burton grew up around an abbey which had been established near the river, although the Romans had been here earlier. The town was granted a charter to hold a market by King John in 1200,
Last week I took a short road trip into a local area where the wildness of the moors is left behind in a delightful wooded South Pennines valley. This is a place with history and points of interest aplenty, whilst as you would probably expect my trip also included visiting a couple of splendid pubs.... And so I was driving high into the Pennine Hills along the A58, which runs for 75 miles between Wetherby in West Yorkshire to Prescot on Merseyside, although I was only doing a short stretch around the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. I had passed through the large village of Ripponden on the Halifax to Rochdale stretch, from where the road climbs into the hills, leaving the houses largely behind save for the odd farmhouse or barn sat within the fields. In the distance were the moors, looking gloomy under a glowering sky, dark grey clouds broken up occasionally by a flash of blue and burst of sunshine. A chain of pylons stretched across the vista, their steely presence adding a sense of mena