A return visit to Nottingham after a few years for football-related reasons, along with a tour of some of the city's pubs made for an enjoyable weekend in this fine city. Well, apart from the football, that is.... When the 2022-23 fixtures came out, one fixture that stood out as a potential stopover was Town's visit to Notts County on the last Saturday in January. Fast forward a few months and our group of 10 assembled in Huddersfield in dribs and drabs, some of us finding our original plan to visit the station buffet thwarted as it was closed. So necessity meant it was a trip to the nearby The Cherry Tree for the dreaded Spoons breakfast, which heralded the customary moans and mumbles about rubber eggs and cold beans but we all survived. Then it was the leisurely saunter down to Sheffield via the Holme Valley, Penistone, and Barnsley. Once in the Steel City we boarded an East Midlands train and landed in Nottingham around 12.30 and followed the same pre-match routine as last
All over the country there are countless small towns which simply carry on at their own pace and in their own way as they go about their daily business. And with that in mind, I recently paid a visit to a neighbouring town to which I rarely go to check out the local pub and bar scene. Here's what I found.... Cleckheaton is a small town in West Yorkshire, situated just off Junction 26 of the M62, otherwise known as the Chain Bar roundabout. A town of around 17,000 souls, it lies about 4 miles to the east from where I live in Brighouse, and is south of Bradford, west of Batley, and south west of Leeds, and part of its name is sometimes used somewhat disparagingly by folks from other parts of Yorkshire to refer to this part of West Yorkshire as Cleckhuddersfax . Cleckheaton though can proudly claim to be the centre of the Spen Valley. It's growth came about through the textile trade and is historically part of the Heavy Woollen District. The town prospered through the latter part