A visit to Beamish Museum is a real look back to the good old days... a pie, a pint and pickles on the bar.

LIKE the dodo and the dingy skipper - which is a butterfly - the pie and a pint is as near as dammit extinct. It's the zealots of environmental health to blame.

It's true that there's one pub in Darlington where a Taylor's growler may occasionally be obtained, but the transaction is perforce coded, under the counter, a bit like the barber who'd ask if there were anything for the weekend.

Barbers, of course, don't usually sell pork pies.

It was with unrestrained joy, therefore, that at the Sun Inn at Beamish Museum we discovered old-fashioned pies beneath a transparent cover on the bar top, handled - lest the environmental sharpen their scalpels - with all the clinical concern of a surgeon with a swab.

"They're from Yorkshire - you know, the pie factory that burned down," said Sun landlord John Taylor, at once investing a degree of omniscience hitherto unsuspected.

Brick by brick, the Sun was rebuilt from a pub of the same name next to the old Bishop Auckland police station and courthouse. Drunks would fall from one to the other, and sometimes vice-versa.

The front bar, notes the museum handbook, was strictly a male preserve. Women were allowed - "albeit with some loss of reputation" - into the select room at the back.

John Taylor, a rather more enlightened landlord, had the Beamish Mary at No Place, a mile up the road, renowned for his passion for real ale and for vintage motor bikes.

His bike now has a sidecar, in which barrels of beer fit conveniently.

Like the rest of the Beamish "town", the pub stopped in 1913. John, wing-collared and jovial, looks like an older version of Edward in Upstairs, Downstairs and is thus perfect for the part.

It looks and smells like an old pub, has a sprinkling of sawdust and a large measure of old style courtesy. The effect may slightly be tarnished, however, by a notice in the back parlour: "Please do not eat your own food in this exhibit."

It's still a museum piece, of course. Overall admission is £12, but there's not just a whole day's enjoyment but reason to buy a season ticket.

The harmonium in the restored chapel played Onward Christian Soldiers, the galloping horse carousel played All of a Sudden A Bloody Great Puddin', or whatever are the more refined words to that familiar tune.

The station had posters for Bracing Bridlington and Healthful Hartlepool ("unsurpassed scenic delights"), the old manor was fascinating, the young staff in their period costumes pleasant without exception.

The Sun sold Mordue's Five Bridges, Marston's Pedigree and Theakston's Old Peculier. It sold Fentiman's born again lemonade and sarsaparilla, billed as Gateshead's health drink. The Boss thought it horrible. Sarsaparilla, said John, was the reason that the Australian cricketer Shane Warne failed a drug test. A comedian called Geordie Welch, he added, swore by sarsaparilla shandy. The Boss ordered another lemonade.

The bar top also offered pickled eggs, pickled onion, chutney and mustard and there were sandwiches - or to be precise there was a crab mayonnaise sandwich - from the same company which supplies the vending machine at work.

The column and that mechanical monster have a somewhat strained relationship, best expressed by the maxim "Change is inevitable except from a vending machine", though it was for reasons purely of diversity that we decided to try the Dainty Dinah tea room, across the road. Five minutes later we were back in the pub, savouring the last sandwich. The Dainty Dinah may on that unkempt evidence be most kindly described as unappealing, and least kindly as the Dainty Dire.

John Taylor hopes also to begin his own brewery at Beamish. "The water's Burtonistic," he said, and beer buffs will understand. For the present he lives happily in the past; the Sun shines very brightly.

DOUG Arnold in Coxhoe, near Durham proposes several ingenious items which might be found on the Binns' "gay tray", mentioned last week. Sadly, not one of them appears to be printable.

THE Bridgewater Arms at Winston was once the village school, thus promoting great satchels of puns about being an education, an object lesson and so forth.

The cast of Jack and the Beanstalk, the 1957 school pantomime, remain gold lettered above the bar; the toilets, inevitably, are boys and girls, the kitchen has "dinner lady" on the door.

It's run by Claire Dowson and Johnny Edwards: she blonde, slender and wholly charming, he - as the column previously has suggested - maker of the best pork crackling in all England.

We almost lost him. Just over a year ago he emigrated to Australia, was discovered on arrival to have the wrong visa and within five hours was back on a plane to Blighty.

"They said I could appeal but I'd have to stay in detention," he recalls. "I looked at some of the other people in detention and thought I'd be better off at home."

Their loss...

He and his twin brother Simon worked with their parents at the St Cuthbert's Inn near Scorton, now closed. Simon's been five years in the kitchen at the Black Bull at Moulton, Johnny's mastering the old school.

Winston's just off the A67, between Darlington and Barnard Castle. We went on Sunday lunchtime, newspapers scattered around, meals served bistro-style in the bar or in an appealing and nicely furnished little nest of non-smoking nooks out the back.

"I think this must have been the stationery cupboard," said The Boss, but it couldn't have been because there was no writing on the wall.

The menu embraced four roasts, all £6.95, and much else. Sixteen starters included a terrific curried prawn risotto (£5.50) and a dish of king scallops with garlic and cheese which The Boss thought little short of sensational.

Claire had suggested that the beef was particularly good and is to be commended for her perceptiveness - tender almost to the point of being molten, generously carved, best in years. Incorrigibly, we ordered it with pork crackling.

The vegetables, side-plated, were every bit as good, their flavour cooked in, not out, but Johnny's a Yorkshireman and thus serves Sunday lunch with the gravy already poured.

Since Winston is 100 yards on the sensible side of the Tees, he really ought to push the boat out.

The Boss ordered black bream bon femme, £12.50 but worth every morsel. Other unexpected Sunday lunches might have been chicken breast in Parma ham with a blue cheese sauce (£10.95), pan fried salmon with capers and prawns (£10.50) or for £7.50, Cumberland sausage.

The pudding, two spoons, was a classic: grilled peaches, amaretto ice cream, clotted cream, like all the others £3.95.

Beers included Greene King IPA (£2.20), presently marketed as A Beer to Dine For and entirely complementary.

Service is young, well trained, attentive. Should they need further home economics lessons, however, they might try a little precis.

"Is everything all right here?" invites the response "Yes, but it's pouring down in Darlington.". "Have you enjoyed your meal today" encourages reminiscence of yesterday.

It is to quibble, because this was a truly excellent Sunday lunch. Like Jack and the Beanstalk circa 1957, the Bridgewater is a class act.

* Bridgewater Arms, Winston, Co Durham, (01325 730302.) Sunday lunch 12-5pm. No problem for the disabled.

MORE familiarly known as the Hammer and Pincers, the Blacksmiths Arms at Preston-le-Skerne near Newton Aycliffe is on the market at £395,000 and would make an "ideal home" or "excellent development site", say the agents. We've spent several happy nights there. Darlington CAMRA say they're "rather worried."

A BIT like the now famili ar question of what bears do in the wood, last week's column asked if shellfish swim. It was a rhetorical reference to The Boss, yet again, having mussels as a starter.

"Shellfish that swim include the swimming crab liocarcinus repurator and the velvet, aka the fiddler crab," writes Tom Purvis from Sunderland.

"Their flattened, paddle-like hind legs are used to swim rapidly sideways to avoid predators such as cuttlefish."

Thanks.

All of which led the bairns to the old joke about what's blonde, dangerous and lives at the bottom of the sea.

A gangster's mollusc, of course.