Real Ale, Real Music

Last weekend I took my first trip to Chorley for a few years and enjoyed an excellent beer festival with a difference. Not based in one place, it was spread across 13 venues in the centre of this friendly central Lancashire town. I didn't go to all of them but I had a lovely afternoon in the places I did visit.... It had been almost exactly 6 years since I had last visited Chorley, and so I had a fair bit of catching up to do. When I'd heard about this multi-venue beer festival earlier in the week I thought it would give me the chance to do just that. So on a wet Saturday morning I caught the train from Halifax to Preston, and from there onwards to Chorley, around 12 minutes away. A former mill town, like many in Lancashire, Chorley owed its development to the cotton industry, but today other than the rows of terraced houses which were built for the cotton workers few signs remain. It is now home to a number of varied industries and given its proximity to other Lancashire towns...

A few years ago I started writing this bloggy thing called Real Ale, Real Music . This weekend I was reminded of why I started writing it in the first place when I visited a favourite venue in Halifax which will shortly be embarking on the next stage of its adventure.... I have always enjoyed a generous serving of music to accompany a beer or two and it was in recognition of that fact that I first initially, and very tentatively, put fingers ( or more accurately, finger! ) to keyboard and wrote a blog about this particular pleasurable way of passing the time, with the title drawing the two together. And whilst over the years I have written far more about beer than I have about music, the intention in those days was to feature both more evenly whenever or if I even did another. Back in 2014 when I did that initial blog you would have found me most Sunday afternoons in one of the pubs in Brighouse or surrounding areas,  enjoying some live music from mainly local bands and singers alo...

The sun was shining down as I joined a group of friends on the annual Good Friday day out which this year returned to Leeds for the first time since 2016. Read on to see where we went.... It was a glorious day as the train pulled in to Leeds station. We'd enjoyed a lovely breakfast at the Station Cafe in Brighouse and then in Leeds we were due to meet up with the rest of the guys who were arriving from different parts of West Yorkshire for our annual Good Friday day out. Unable to establish phone contact with them we headed off to our first port of call situated in the Granary Wharf area beside the canal, a few minutes' walk away, passing a weird and incongruous replica dinosaur marooned in one of docks in this attractive spot, which marks the start and end of the 127-mile trans Pennine Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Having passed the Ossett run Hop we shortly arrived at one of their craft-themed bars operating under the  Salt banner, located on the ground floor of a round tower o...

A trip to Derbyshire, Chesterfield to be precise where we called in some of the town's fine pubs. Plus a shout out for a few other great pubs in that county that I have visited over the years.... This is not a football blog, but I do admit that it has been mentioned here a little of late. However as all my recent journeys have been based around trips to watch football it is inevitable it will find a way in to the odd paragraph. And the reason for my visit to Chesterfield the other week was for, yes, you guessed it, another football match! So for those of you who are not interested in football, skip the 6th paragraph, after which it's back to the pubs and beer stuff! I had last visited the town in 2019, the second largest in the county, also for football, which was featured in a  blog  covering a number of the town's pubs. Highlights of that visit were the Neptune Beer Emporium, with its excellent beer and friendly welcome, and the Chesterfield Alehouse, the town's first...