Blighty Bound - Day Seven, An Unusual Pub

 

It was a nice slow start for us as we were expecting family guests, followed by an excursion into Buckfastleigh to the Valiant Soldier pub. 

The Valiant Soldier isn't a regular pub, it's actually a museum.

The museum's website sums it up well:

The Valiant Soldier was an active pub in Buckfastleigh which closed in the late 1960′s and never re-opened. Everything was literally left as it was and today, it’s open as a museum, giving visitors a glimpse into the past.

The current building which houses the Valiant Soldier dates from the 1700′s and the earliest mention of it as a pub is in 1813.

It had various landlords through the 19th and early 20th centuries and in 1939 its last landlord, Mark Roberts, became the tenant. In 1965 the brewery withdrew the license and Mr and Mrs Roberts promptly downed tools as the last customers left the premises, leaving everything just as it was.  The doors remained closed even after the family purchased the property from the brewery. After Mr Roberts died his wife, Alice carried on living in the upper part of the property until the mid-90′s.

When the family left the area, the pub remained untouched – the living quarters with its furniture, the bar with the optics, glasses, and brewery ephemera – even the change in the till! Also a huge number of bills, invoices, letters and photographs were left behind giving an insight into the workings of a small mid-20th century town pub.

Website here. 

DW had contacted the museum to see if they would be open in March, and while normally they would have been open one day a week, various difficulties had prevented the staff there from keeping their regular hours. However, after a bit of e-mail traffic, we did manage to secure a tour of the Valiant Soldier on an irregular day.

Buckfastleigh is a cosy little town lying in the steep folds of the Dart Valley, and has a long industrial history, despite it's agricultural surroundings. Mining, of tin and other local minerals, wool milling, and textile production were predominant. You'd hardly believe it now as the town very is quiet, largely I suspect because the main trade now is tourism, built up around the local Benedictine abbey and the heritage steam railway, both on the edge of town. It being a couple of weeks before Easter, the tourists had yet to arrive, except us of course. 

There are only a couple of working pubs left in Buckfastleigh now, but the Valiant Soldier stands as a testimony to a once thriving pub trade that saw dozens of drinking establishments, serving the workers from the mines, the mill and the railway.

The Valiant Soldier has been left pretty much as it was found. Old furniture, old flooring, old bottles, old barrels, you name it. It really is like stepping back to the 1950s. Obviously there has been some modern work to deal with the maintenance of the building (it struggles with damp, unsurprisingly), but the bar, the Snug, the kitchen, and the living accommodation have been preserved, and it's quite the experience to stand in among it.

The tour also took us into the tiny Buckfastleigh Museum, which managed to have a staggering amount of interesting artifacts crammed into a couple of rooms. As all good museums do, it informed me of a load of stuff about the area that I didn't know about. All for GBP6, too, which was quite excellent value.

If all goes to plan then we'll be heading, unusually, eastwards tomorrow, although the the weather doesn't look too promising. It'll be what it'll be I suppose.