Old pubs with a story to them

How a pub joins a collection

A collection here is a tag, not an opinion. Every pub in our data carries a short list of plain descriptors — thatched, coaching-inn, riverside, rooms, ghost — written down when the pub was researched, and each collection above is every pub carrying one of them, gathered when the site is built. Nobody is left out for being unfashionable or put in for photographing well, and one house can sit in several at once: the Old Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell has a reed roof, stands by the Great Ouse, lets rooms and tells a ghost story, so it turns up under thatch, water, beds and ghosts alike.

A tag describes a pub; it never grades one. The ghost tag records that the house tells the story, not that we have checked the ghost, and the date a pub claims, the earliest record traced and the grade between them travel with it onto every list. Two rules keep the lists honest: a collection needs at least six qualifying pubs before it earns a page, and only pubs still pouring are gathered — when one closes it leaves for the archive of pubs that have stopped pouring.

Which one to start with

Coaching inns are the easiest to read as buildings: the carriage arch, the yard behind it and, where one survives, the gallery around it are the shape of a timetable, and our guide to what a coaching inn actually was explains that before you stand in one. Thatch is the shortest walk from a collection to a date, because thatch, cob and cruck frames are fabric a surveyor can argue about, which is why several thatched pubs hold a grade B rather than a C. Old pubs with rooms is the one to plan a journey around, though rooms come and go and the pub's own website is the word on that. And haunted pubs is where the storytelling is thickest: a ghost story is often the oldest thing a house can tell you about itself, and the least checkable, which is how so many of them end up in myths, checked.