Packing a punch (From The Northern Echo)

Packing a punch

6:01am Tuesday 9th January 2007 in Reviews By Mike Amos

Sporting a major facelift, a Dales pub is back with a vengeance - having been bought by the couple who have successfully runa neighbouring hostelry for the past ten years.

THE bucolic opening shots of the television series All Creatures Great and Small, it may be recalled, featured an aged jalopy splashing its way through a ford before pottering, open-topped and amiable, up a seldom-seen moorland road.

The water splash is between Swaledale and Arkengarthdale in North Yorkshire, the road until recently little busier than when James Herriot was a lad.

Suddenly it's like the M25, or the B-something-or-other, at any rate. Charles and Stacey Cody, who for ten years have run the Charles Bathurst Inn at Langthwaite, in Arkengarthdale, last year also bought the Punch Bowl at Low Row, Swaledale, three and a half undulating miles to the south.

Staff commute. "We're back and forth all the time," says a pleasant lass behind the Punch Bowl bar. "Usually we're asked to bring a dozen spoons across, or some towels or whatever. We rarely travel empty handed."

The CB, as it remains best known, has been a deserved and much lauded success. The food's imaginative and carefully cooked, the atmosphere congenial, the accommodation nationally acclaimed and the setting - inevitably - magnificent. The really tricky bit, admirably and artfully achieved, is to sustain a place that's simultaneously as welcoming to the well-heeled as - so long as first he remove his muddy boots - to the wet and weary walker.

(It is not to suggest that walkers may not be equally well-heeled, of course, at least until they've tugged off their clarty size tens).

The Punch Bowl's different, closed these past three years and reopened, much transformed, on December 15. Though the location is superb, the air fresh and the building dating from the 17th century, it seems many years since the Punch Bowl punched its weight.

The last chap had been warden of the youth hostel at Keld, further up the dale, running the Punch Bowl as a pub - a very welcoming pub - with bunkhouse accommodation attached. "Where he had 12 bunks, we'll probably have a small double," says Charles Cody, and in Swaledale they'll be rooms with a view.

The whole family first footed on New Year's Eve, a soggy Sunday lunchtime. If not exactly running over, the Punch Bowl was well filled. Most seemed dressed for a party, though walkers would occasionally squelch in from the storm, as if auditioning for a bit part in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

The flames in the main bar could hardly have blazed more brightly if stoked by Beelzebub himself. Notices in the two connecting dining rooms indicated that there was to be no smoking - or, they might have added, any other incendiary activity.

That it is Charles Bathurst's progeny is reflected right down to the mirrors on which the menu is written and to their inventive, if not necessarily inexpensive, offerings.

Weekday main courses include whole poached baby chicken with savoury bread and butter pudding and Noilly Prat sauce (£12. 95), seafood, saffron and asparagus risotto (£13.95) and mushroom and sweet pepper stroganoff with cous-cous (£12.95).

The floors are bare boarded, the main bar furniture by Thompson the Mouseman, the walls hung with photographs of old Swaledale and with artefacts like Percival's 1939 bus timetable and the long-gone programme for Low Row Congregational Church's two-day bazaar, in which the first day's highlight appeared to be a sketch called The Ventriloquist Pawnbroker and the second something called The Contented Plumber. These days you can't get one, contented or otherwise.

There was a Sunday lunch menu, too, dishes like a substantial lamb suet pudding with juniper and red currant, a "light, crisp and delicious" Swaledale cheese, pesto and tomato tart with ratatouille chutney, roast beef ("absolutely beaut," said the younger son) and filo-wrapped salmon with ginger; lime and coriander in a hollandaise sauce which, alone, may need an asterisk and an explanation.

The Boss thought the pastry overpowered the poor fish-out-of-water, the ginger indiscernible and the effect cloying. Vegetables were fine, save for the first taste of a stunted roast parsnip which must have been a reckling (a word which has caused considerable debate elsewhere.)

Several had begun with a dusky, musky and thoroughly enjoyable pea and ham soup, another with smoked salmon and trout with horseradish cream. Puddings included honey and Southern Comfort creme brulee, fruits of the forest gateau - "nice brandy snaps" - and a fine Eton mess.

With three hand pumps and thirsts in keeping (shall we say) with the glad occasion, the lunch bill for four reached £93. Splash in, splash out. Happy New Year.

AFTER the blow-out, the blow. By car to Langdon Beck, top end of Teesdale, then five and a half wild miles across Harthope Common and down into St John's Chapel, in Weardale.

A sign warned cyclists that weather conditions could be poor at all times of the year, as if not expecting walkers even to have got that far. It was foggy, soggy and blowing a gale. Around St John's, notices advertised the appearance of the Sunshine Boys on January 26. They'd better make the most of it.

Thereafter back to the ever-hospitable Langdon Beck Hotel, where the wind outside had gusted to 91mph on New Year's Eve, where landlord Glenn Matthews keeps three coal fires roaring simultaneously and where Sue, his wife, makes a mean cottage pie.

Real ales included Rivet Catcher from the Jarrow Brewery and the distinctive Black Grouse from the Allendale Brewery in Northumberland, marking its first birthday.

They're also proudly displaying a certificate from the all-party Parliamentary Beer Group, following appreciative visits by Bishop Auckland MP Helen Goodman and Dave Anderson, the member for Blaydon. A fanfare from the Commons man.

WE also spent a Christmas evening at the Plantation in Howden-le-Wear, near Crook, recently taken over by Andrew Gibson. His dad's Garry Gibson, Wheatley Hill lad and former chairman of Hartlepool United FC.

As often, it was foggy across the A68. "Howden-le-Wear seems like the Promised Land," said the Boss, as it came into view from 25 yards.

It was quiz night. What's a scutch, which country's parliament is called the Alphing, of what Christmas treat is St Ascot Hunters an anagram?

The questions were set by Dave Quinn - good bloke, former local councillor and egg jarping aficionado. "He was once in the final of Fifteen-to-One," folk said, proudly. Since Garry Gibson and his wife Gaynor were also there, we formed a team called Hartlepool United.

The pub's going well, lovely pint of London Pride, food only on Sunday lunchtimes and on Friday evenings, when the chap who used to have Morton's acclaimed fish ship in Bishop comes in to fry, fry and fry again.

"He brings his own secret batter with him," said Andrew. "He won't even tell me what's in it."

The fog cleared sufficiently for Hartlepool United to finish third. The same at the end of the season will do nicely.

... and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew a dinosaur's favourite television show.

The X-tinct Factor, of course.