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First visited : 24 July 2011
The rival pub to Flower Of The Valley in Hamer is almost opposite , having the advantage of being on the same side of the road as the shops. It is an eighteenth century three storied building with original mullioned windows at the top. The name derives from a large Lancashire landowning family who had a branch living at nearby Foxholes Hall. The hall was demolished in 1973 but you can still see the old driveway going off to it further down the A58.
This is another pub with a bus stop that I used to use outside, the reason being that the shop next door was at one time The Aquarist Bowl and supplied most of the tropical fish we kept briefly in 1976-77 and the last tank we used for goldfish. The owner wasn't particularly friendly but it was the nearest place that sold tropicals and they were usually healthy. I think it closed down early in the eighties.
I dropped in around 2pm today. It's fairly small , clean and tidy but very old-fashioned apart from the inevitable TV screens for Sky Sports. There's a cosy bar area then a larger room to the right which can be curtained off for meetings ( an IT club meets there on a Thursday night ) and a large games room beyond. The pub also appears to have claimed possession of the road (John William St ) running behind it as there are wooden picnic tables forming an effective roadblock. It's not exactly a beer garden but most of the other customers ( middle-aged men ) were out there this afternoon. The landlord seemed a nice bloke.
It's an unpretentious friendly pub but the same observation I made about Flower of the Valley applies here.
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