JUST when you think you've cracked it and you know all the best pubs in which to have a drink and a chat, you come across a place like this.

It's well off the beaten track and, I am sure, regulars and aficionados of quality inns like it that way.

You have to know how to find it (it's hidden down a country lane some 250 yards from Bedmond's tin church) but when you do, you won't be sorry.

This place has a lounge bar dating back to the 16th Century and a sit down restaurant with table waiting service.

To be frank, the fireplace and brickwork in the lounge looks its age you imagine it's just about fit to fall down but it's comforting and somehow you, in your heart of Harts, know it will be there for another century or two at least.

The bar is small and rather intimate. There's a little, even more intimate snug for that private tete a tete, and plenty of seating. My favourite was the dead comfy, heavily padded bar stools I could have spent the entire weekend sat on one, never mind an all too brief afternoon sojourn.

Stella was £2.60 a point (ouch) IPA an altogether more reasonable £1.12.

As you would imagine a bar with a restaurant next door serves up some top nosh. It boasts real food cooked on the premises and one wall is devoted to a number of chalkboards displaying the daily changing fare.

On another wall you will find copies of the Illustrated Mail commemorating the death of Queen Victoria back in 1901. I bet the pub has hardly changed in the century and more that has passed since the great lady's demise.

I wish it hadn't taken me so long to find the White Hart.

FA

January 30, 2003 12:00