Manor House Inn, Carterway Heads
The other great advantage of the A68 is that it is not a main road and inhabited by crap, boring service areas. There are good pubs everywhere.
I was driving the road around lunchtime and a sign informed me a pub called the Manor House Inn, was coming up. The sign said good food and real ales and as many coeliacs and other allergy sufferers will tell you, real ale pubs are often sympathetic to special diets.
I entered and looked at the special menu on the wall.
Specials Menu, Manor House Inn
I liked the look of the seared venison. I asked the landlord, Neil Oxley, whether it was gluten-free and he said he’d ask the chef. The reply was that the chef would make it so. The pub also had some proper, Weston’s cider. Not as good as my local Aspall, but very safe for coeliacs.
It was one of the best pub lunches I’d had outside of places I know very well in a long time. A lot of coeliacs like their vegetables and I had a choice of five; potatoes, carrots, swede, cabbage and broccoli. All were excellent, as was the venison.
I asked the landlord’s wife, Emma, if everything was local and she said yes.
This is what good pub food should be about. I shall go back again, the next time I’m in the area.
The pub is also a good excuse to burn up the A68. I might even stay there, as the pub has rooms for the night.
Manor House Inn, Carterway Heads
Left and Right, Up and Down
Of all the roads in England, few are as notorious for a good burn-up as the A68, that runs from the Scottish Border to Darlington. It’s up and over a blind summit, then fast left, fast right or possibly both. In places you can see the road stretching several kilometres in the distance.
Yesterday, as I returned from Scotland, the road was pretty empty except for a couple of wagons and a few cars, so it was great fun. And safe too, as if you drive the road properly in good visibility and fairly dry conditions, you have no problems unless you take some of the blind summits too fast.
As I said in the related post on Taking the High Road, it’s the sort of road for which Elans were built!
I have rather an affection for the A68 as several times I drove it on the way to see the first Metier customer, Ferranti, in Edinburgh. In those days though, it wasn’t in an Elan. But there weren’t any speed cameras!
The Anonymous Widower 