Force field

Maternal wisdom further enjoined that your sins would be sure to find you out – these days someone just sprags – and by way of further apronstring aphorism that honesty was the best policy.

There’s an honesty box at the head of the path leading down to the hyperactive High Force waterfall in Teesdale – adults £1.50, concessions £1, car parking £2. Hand on heart, it seemed precious little used.

In summer, the path’s guarded by a man in a little hexagonal hut, a sort of toll gate – or troll gate, if the Billy Goats Gruff happen to be passing. In the winter there’s danger of a freefor- all. This is not a view, it should be said, with which Lord Barnard would agree, and we shall return to his lordship shortly.

It’s years since we’d been down to High Force, probably just as long since we’d eaten at the High Force Hotel.

One of many notices warns that visitors proceed at their own risk and that they will “indemnify Lord Barnard, the Upper Teesdale estate and its employees against any damage of whatever nature arising in connection with the visit.”

Others warn against slippery paths, urge visitors not to pick flowers, forbid cycling, talk of the upper Teesdale rocks being 330 million years old – Who counts? How do they know? – and of the area 18,000 years ago being covered by a sheet of ice.

In that respect, at least, nothing much may have changed. Recent deluges notwithstanding, the falls seemed little more turbulent than usual. There seemed plenty of visitors, including those who just clambered over the rocks and had a picnic.

Perhaps it explains the dishonesty box: they simply can’t read.

While perhaps not 330 million years old, the hotel seems to have been there an awfully long time, and to have changed little.

On the wall there’s an elderly photograph of the royal shooting party – the future Edward VII, by the look of him – and another captioned “The High Force Hotel before the advent of the automobile”.

Much of the interior could offer the setting for a Fifties sitcom and still give the props department change from a tenner.

Years ago, it was home to an interesting chap called Denis Coggins, whose wife had the licence, who was also a renowned archaeologist and lecturer and still found time to run the mountain rescue team.

Some time after that, the High Force even had a brewery out the back. The beer, memory suggests, was rather more interesting than the food used to be and thus Sunday lunch – pretty much a Fifties experience itself – came as a very pleasant surprise.

The fire roared, the music machine played – Seventies stuff, but you can’t have everything – and we sat next to one of those old radios that could pick up Hilversum and Athlone and thought itself the cat’s whiskers. The brewery no longer in full vigour, or indeed any vigour whatsoever, the bar offered Theakston’s bitter or Rudgate Mild, the 2009 Champion Beer of Great Britain.

Sadly, it was one of those Sabbaths when the At Your Service column was on duty in the afternoon – down at Middleton-in-Teesdale – and when a half of Coke was sipped, soberly, by way of Lenten penance.

It was also down at St Mary’s in Middleton that we bumped into Lord Barnard, master of much that he surveys thereabouts, and invited an honest assessment of the way that High Force charges worked.

Lord Barnard, who is 86, believed that folk were generally honest. “We check the boxes quite often. It’s usually impressive,” he said.

Back at the High Force Hotel, the menu offered rolls, a few staples plus roast beef, roast lamb and something called boozy beef, which also seemed inadvisable before church.

Roast beef was £8.50, steak and kidney pie about the same, together served with bowls of chips – hot, fresh, crisp – of fragrant sliced potatoes layered with butter, double cream and nutmeg, of cabbage with bits of bacon and a mixture of carrots, cauliflower and broccoli that hadn’t been properly drained.

The Boss’s lamb came with two Yorkshire puddings. It was the first time she’d eaten a Yorkshire, save for her own, for years. Proof of the pudding, if ever.

Unable to manage a dessert, she nevertheless purloined several spoonfuls of custard from the oldschool spotted dick on the other side of the table.

When the elder son was on the way, she recalled – and as usual, in no great hurry – she had a craving for custard. It is to be hoped, and indeed confidently believed, that she hasn’t fallen wrong again.

It had been a proper, unpretentious, wholly enjoyable and genuinely home-made Sunday lunch. If not a force majeure then, out of ten, a good force seven. Would I tell you a lie?

■ High Force Hotel, Forest-in-Teesdale DL12 0XH. Tel: 01833-622222 ANOTHER period piece, Darlington Snooker Club – now a real ale haven – celebrated its 95th anniversary authentically. The elderly till had been borrowed from Sandsend Stores, near Whitby, after Doug and Irene Raine’s retirement was reported in the John North column.

The gramophone – older yet – played everything from The Lord’s Prayer to Unchained Melody, back when Jimmy Young really was. The indefatigable Rita Everett, her own age somewhere between cash register and phonograph, took the till and turned the handle. Always was a wind-up merchant, our Rita.

Subsequently it was learned that Rita and her lad Peter have again won Darlington Camra’s club of the year award, the Crown at Manfield both country pub and overall winner and the small but perfectly formed Quaker Bar taking the town award.

TWO weeks ago we enthused about Rustique, a French-themed bistro just off Richmond market place. It was doubtless coincidence that, last Tuesday evening, folk could hardly stir in there. It’s very good.

Word arrives of more imminent arrivals on Richmond’s dining radar. Early bird, however, we had breakfast in Harvey’s and that got us off to a flyer, too.

It’s a small place, just half-a-dozen tables, but so perfectly located that, when she ran out of components of the “Full Monty” breakfast, the lady just left the frying pan on and nipped across the road to the butcher’s.

Everything’s good quality, clearly fresh – the Boss liked her bacon butty, too – and with plenty of juices with which gainfully to employ the toast. Rolls are described as “rustic”, doubtless an English cousin.

With two cups of good, real coffee, £9.45 the lot.

IT’S a few weeks back now that we wondered on Martin Donbavand’s behalf if anyone remembered a Sixties drink called a Johnny Pino. Harold Watson, in Darlington, did. “It was a strongish red wine type of drink in a Britvictype bottle and very popular with the ladies.” It may also have been popular with the gentlemen, when Harold lived on Tyneside back then. “A Johnny Pino was known to the lads as a kicker dropper,” he adds.

… and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call a nervous witch.

A twitch.