(Acknowledgements to www.derekparsons.com for the picture )
First visited : 2 April 2016
This was a long-delayed visit and something of a nostalgia trip.
I used to see The Yew Tree every day between 1978 and 1983 from the windows of my last school Bishop Henshaw RC Memorial School. The school's cross country course , such as it was, went right past it . A few months before I went to the school, my Mum had dined at the Yew Tree with her playgroup colleagues , in the pub's most distinctive feature, a genuine Pullman railway carriage which had been parked beside it since 1968. The carriage apparently remained there until 1998 when it became too costly for the pub to repair so it was sold on to the East Lancashire Railway.
Some of the sixth formers used the pub's car park ; whether or not they paid something for this I couldn't say.
There was , probably still is , a bus stop right outside it which I used when returning from after school activities.
The pub's had a big face lift since then and is quite odd inside. When you go through the front door you're into a beige-painted corridor and it's not immediately obvious where the bar is. In fact it's the second door on the right. The pub still does food but I didn't sample any of it. It's spotlessly clean and well kept.
I went in a rather odd front lounge with painted photos of Edwardian ( I'm guessing ) people whose names meant absolutely nothing to me. But it was the view from the window that captivated me. Bishop Henshaw's has physically disappeared ( it became known as St Cuthbert's in an unnecessary sop to the failed middle schools that used to feed it, when they were abolished in 1989 ). Apart from a small sub-station on the far left of the site, all the buildings I knew have been razed to the ground and replaced by new ones . I had been back the odd time for summer fetes and things in the nineties but now it is no more. There was nothing of any great architectural merit to mourn but one's past gets less tangible by the day and sights like that bring it home to you.
