A New Travelling Friend! Or Rather, an Old One Who Has Come to Join the Party
Being the original raconteur of the spooky story of Round Ring, otherwise known as Bampfylde Clump, that Martin kindly resurrected in his ever-engaging Lockdown Diary (no.63), his retelling reminded me not only of my introduction to West Somerset and all its wonders, but of seminal journeys we take, all of us, that change our lives.
As a callow youth and, yes, would-be ‘romantic poet’ but very far from ‘successful Media blah-blah-blah’ (which is debatable at best), I was at the mercy of any wind that blew. It was my good fortune to have a friend, when aged 17, who was very tall, somewhat stooped, and a fisherman who loved the rich fly pickings of the River Taw, centred at the well-known hostelry of The Rising Sun at Umberleigh, in North Devon.
I lived at the time near Stourhead, where the three counties of Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset met, and he down the road in the wilds of North Somerset. One day he proposed a journey that would take us not only to his little cottage near South Molton but through the ways and folklore of the A303 and a little, but critical, detour via a very special pub.
Eli’s, as many of you will know, is a very different pub to your average roadside hostelry. The Rose and Crown, at Huish Episcopi, on the fringes of Langport, has been in possession of the same family for almost exactly 100 years and has been a pub since the mid-17th century. Eli Scott and his wife, Maude, took over the pub on the death of William Slade in 1921 and their daughter, Eileen, born in 1923, eventually succeeded to the mantle of landlady, with her husband, Jim, in 1978, on the death of Eli, aged 84.
Well, I was there in 1969, when a pint of cider, a chunk of cheddar and hunk of bread (and I mean a hunk) cost all of 2/6d. It was my introduction to a whole new world, thanks to my friend, of what a true ‘parlour pub’ could – and heaven knows, should – be and, against all odds, still is. And, of course, cider.
Before that, there were two brothers, twins, at West Knoyle, just off the Wiltshire Downs, who sold an evil brew. ‘Tha’s roight, tha’s roight, yar, yar, yar’, they would chime in unison, as we tapped some greenish liquor from a vast, but sadly putrid, barrel.
Eli’s, it may not surprise you, was a revelation. What I didn’t know at the time was that a certain gentleman called Julian Temperley was yet to bestow his further revelation of the single variety cider apple from down the road at Burrow Hill. Nevertheless, the pint I had, down a 17 year old gullet, gave me a taste for a drink that has stayed with me to my near dotage, even to the point of attempting to make something in that mould, with my wife Gill, over the last 30 years, starting in Normandy and culminating in Herefordshire.
Tim with Julian Temperley in more recent times
Scrumpy has a notoriety not ill-deserved. But cider, real, pure juice cider, properly made, is something of a different order.
I had my baptism and never looked back. Eileen was the sweetest soul who once, after a rare absence of some five years or more, following a visit to Eli’s with my elderly and ailing mother, came straight up to me and said, ‘Hello, my dear. I’ve bin waiting for ‘ee to come back. I’ve got your dear mother’s scarf she left behind. Wait there and I’ll bring un to ‘ee’. And she did. And it still smelled of my dear old Mum, who had died the year before.
Since then, Maureen, Trish and Steve have assumed Eileen’s mantle, following her death in 2008, and I have visited year after year, sometimes with a greater gap, but never with anything less than a feeling of coming home. If you love skittles, with a proper alley and proper balls, let alone a place where you can sit and read or write, or mix with old or young, then Eli’s has a bosom which enfolds us all. And the cider never fails.
It was this same tall, stooping friend who took me in several years later, in the midst of 20-something angst, before I set off for what became not only the subject of a Martin Hesp article, but becoming a friend of the man himself and remaining steadfast ever since, despite nearly killing him. But that’s for another tale.
Below - Tim plays skittles at The Rose and Crown
