Keeping on my run of Yorkshire-based blogs, I've just been back to the historic Yorkshire Dales market town of Settle recently where I had a walk around the compact town centre and checked out several of the local hostelries, finding some excellent beer in an unlikely setting.... I had been meaning to re-visit Settle for a while, basically because it's always had one or two pubs in the Good Beer Guide that I have never visited and simply because it's been that long since I last been there that I had basically forgotten what the town looked like. Whilst I have been close to the town over the years on countless trips to the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District, it has generally been whilst travelling on the Settle bypass which opened in 1988, resulting in the traffic jams which use to clog up this attractive Dales market town disappearing. Whilst it gets many of tourists and day trippers, such as the numerous bikers who had ridden here when I visited, assembling at the Old N...
A Saturday afternoon wander around the centre of Leeds taking in some familiar old haunts and more recent additions to the city's drinking establishments.... I went to Leeds the other day for a close season catch up over a few beers with some of the lads I go to football with. A trip to Leeds is not unusual for me, but for some of my companions it was a rare visit to a city which for all of us is less than 20 miles from home. And it set me off thinking back to when I lived in the city in the 1980s as a newcomer and how different the pub scene in the city was then was compared to now. We visited 5 different places over the course of a few hours, all of them pretty close to the railway station. Of these, only two had been around in the 1980s, the other three having appeared at different points within the last 15 years or so. The Leeds real ale scene back then was dominated by the locally-brewed Tetleys with aromas from the brewery regularly wafting across the city. That said, in ter...