The Barley Mow, Littleton, Shepperton

Official site of the Barley Mow, contains beer list - www.themow.co.uk

In a quiet residential side street in Shepperton Green ( across the other side of the M3 from Shepperton itself ) , is The Barley Mow, a fine traditional community local. It’s a comfortably furnished, carpeted pub well decorated with framed cigarette cards, an old typewriter, old prints and ornaments etc. The traditional curved wooden bar, facing us as we enter, is adorned with pump clips and the gantry shelf houses an impressive collection of bottled beers. It’s clearly a community focused pub as a number of photographs of the pub’s river raft team competing on the River Thames during the annual village fete testify. It’s also got its own golf society – The Barmy Mow. A small alcove contains a number of old photographs showing the pub in days long gone when it was either a Manns or a Watneys house. Externally, the pub looks very much unchanged from those days, with a central door either side of a set of bay windows and two decorative wheatsheafs high up on the wall above the entrance. The pub dates back to 1906. On the right of the bar is a dedicated music area with a decorative wall mural covering one wall. Here there’s also a piano. Wednesday evening is jazz night and there’s also music on Saturday evening and Sunday lunchtime. In the lobby leading out to the car park and smoking area at the back are a collection of framed rugby shirts, but this is certainly not a sports orientated pub with, pleasingly, on my Sunday afternoon visit, the pub remaining a sports free zone, despite the fact that several important Premiership football fixtures were on. Also pleasingly, and increasingly unusual for Surrey, it’s very much a drinkers pub with no food to distract us from the serious business of supping and conversing with our fellow human beings, although small bowls of free crisps on the tables are a nice touch. The peace and quiet was later interrupted when the Sunday afternoon music started, which rather dominated proceedings in a smallish pub like this. The landlord is evidently a real ale enthusiast with 5 pumps which were serving an enterprising and interesting range of LocAle beers – Hogs Back TEA, Hop Back Summer Lightning, Hammerpot Woodcote Ale, Bingham Doodle Stout and Windsor and Eton Conqueror Black IPA ( the latter sounding a bit of a contradiction to me ). Notably, and I didn’t pick up on it at the time, 3 of these 5 beers have an ABV of at least 5 % and even the weakest beer – Hogs Back TEA – has an ABV of 4.2%. It seems churlish to be critical, but one wonders if one or more session beers would be an attractive and desirable alternative to one of the stronger brews. The pub has been a CAMRA Good Beer Guide regular for many years now and is the local North Surrey CAMRA Branch Pub of the Year for 2011. This is one of those pubs that you immediately take to and, whilst I’m not sure that I’d put it in the “absolute must-visit” category, it’s not that far short and it’s definitely down for a revisit.

Official site of the Barley Mow, contains beer list - www.themow.co.uk