Eynsham, to the west of Oxford, would not be an obvious choice for a mention on Essex Days Out. We do plan to cover both days out in Essex, and from Essex (primarily, to enable us to cover Suffolk). Eynsham is 125miles away, and travelling there by car can take anything from 2hr15m on a good day and 3hr45m on a rush-hour Monday morning. But as I do this journey once or twice a week for work, that’s enough excuse to give it some coverage.
And another excuse is that it’s real ale, which, as you will have spotted, is a recurrent theme on Essex Days Out.
There are 9 pubs in a village covering only 1,500 adults, as noted on http://www.eynsham.org/pubhist.html , which is quite exceptional. I’d been to a couple of those pubs, but had been rather underwhelmed (with the proviso that one was clearly aimed at locals, and was managing to keep in business without concentrating almost entirely on bringing in people to eat).
One I spotted the other week is The Queen’s Head (http://www.thequeenshead.net/), which was almost perfect.
It’s an old pub and you can’t beat sitting by a crackling log fire with a pint of real ale, in a bar that isn’t faux olde england at all – in fact, at least one of the tables was formica-topped!
The pint in question was White Horse’s ‘Village Idiot’ a lighter beer than I normally prefer, but I took a fancy to the pump clip (to the extent that I’ve since bought one on ebay!). The only minor quibble was that there weren’t any dark beers on, but to expect this from a smaller pub is a bit unrealistic.
However, the landlord reckons there’s a porter on next week, so I’ll be off to try that, and sample their food.
update : there -was- a stout on the next week, Glencoe Wild Oat Stout, and it was absolutely perfect. Just a shame it was a lunchtime and a single pint was the most I could have.