CityLife

Lord Raglan

Lord Raglan

THERE seems to be a general disapproval of a business being a jack of all trades. “Get back to basics”, the management consultants say, “concentrate on the core product.”

This is sometimes true of pubs. Many a landlord is told what drinks to sell and has a menu written by a regional or national head office, while he concentrates on keeping the till ringing.

But this is far from true at the Lord Raglan, a stone-built free house perched on a scenic spot high in the hills above Bury.

The landlords have been brewing their own beer beneath the creaking floorboards of the characterful building for almost a decade and supply other pubs nearby.

Resurrect the ghost

They also run an 80-seater restaurant which is so traditional, with its brasses, hunting scene paintings, plates on the wall and tablecloths that all it needed was antimacassars on the wooden chairs to resurrect the ghost of my long-departed gran.

My gran would have appreciated the traditional menu with meals cooked they way she liked them, with thick gravies and veg properly steeped in water, not merely saunaed by steam.

With our minestrone soup (£2.95), slow-cooked shoulder of lamb (£11.95), vegetable lasagne (£7.75) and puddings (treacle, bread and butter, each £3.95), the food was decent value, though it did feel somewhat like having Sunday lunch in an old people’s home.

But the biggest draw of the Lord Raglan is the beer. The Leyden Brewery makes five regular beers and specials and I had an afternoon on the half-pints to sample the majority of them.

Under-appreciated

It being the Campaign for Real Ale’s Mild May month, celebrating that under-appreciated drink, I had Leyden’s aptly-titled Black Pudding.

They also do the paler Nanny Flyer, named after the vintage bus which used to rattle up and down the cobbled hill to the historic hamlet of Nangreaves.

History is also celebrated in Raglan’s Sleeve (the military Lord after which the pub is named lost an arm at Waterloo) and Balaclava. There were specials, too, of Bojangles and Easter Island.

You can buy bottled beer to take home, including what seems to be Leyden’s most popular brew, Forever Bury, named after the Shakers – and not because they will forever reside in League Two.

Jack of all trades

The pub will also organise barrels of beer and deliver it. In fact, do everything bar pour it for you in your kitchen – that would be taking being a jack of all trades a little too far.

Lord Raglan, Mount Pleasant, Nangreaves, Bury BL9 6SP (0161 764 6680)