Square & Compass, Worth Matravers, Swanage

Iconic, remote country pub in a splendid position overlooking the Jurassic Coast. Picture-book white-washed building, with the most traditional layout inside with the narrow entrance hall leading to the main serving hatch. There is a second hatch down the left-hand side corridor leading to a snug and small museum, and a slightly larger room can be found off to the right. Famed as both a cider and beer pub, there were many of the former and five of latter (including the connected Hattie Brown's Moonlight, £3.50). Difficult to get to, but absolutely worth the effort...

I don’t think there’s anything I can really add to the excellent reviews below, so I will just document the beers that were on offer when I visited. These were Palmer’s Copper Ale, RCH PG Steam, Kite’s Bluestone Bitter and Goodens Gold from the Flower Pots brewery. Ciders were well represented with home pressed ciders consisting of Kiss Me Kate, Eve’s Idea, Sat Down Be Cider and American Mother. Besides these, the more regular offerings were Stowford Press, Cider by Rosie, three from Westons – Old Rosie, Organic Vintage and Perry and three from Hecks – Port Wine of Glastonbury, Kingston Black and Blakeney Red Perry.

My brief sojourn to Dorset, Devon and Cornwall could only really have one pub as the first port of call - The Square and Compass. Named after the local activity of quarrying, it's a fine old stone farmhouse style building, high up in the Purbeck Hills, not too far from Swanage and affording excellent sea views. Arriving by car on a recent Sunday lunchtime ( park in the nearby car park for £ 1 - honesty box provided ), I felt somewhat out of place in my trainers and brewery logo'd sweat shirt, finding that most of the other customers were walkers in sturdy boots and shorts, displaying knobbly knees and carrying walking sticks, or alternatively were super fit looking cyclists. There were also a few seemingly locals, each with the obligatory large dog in tow. Thankfully, the "Chelsea set", to whom previous postings allude, were not conspicuously noticeable. The pub consists of 2 basic rooms at either end of a short, low, wood panelled, flagstoned central corridor, down which you pass to reach the hatched bar counter at the end. The room on the left is basic and has fixed bench seating. The room on the right, where live music sometimes features, is slightly larger, is equally basic and contains a few CAMRA certificates ( including one for 30 years in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide ) and also cider and perry awards. It's one of only a handful of pubs to have appeared in each GBG edition - 37 to date ( up to 2010 ).The Square and Compass is also listed in CAMRA's National Inventory of Heritage Pubs. Further on the left is an interesting museum of local artefacts and fossils, to which admission is free. It's certainly the first pub with an in house museum that I can remember visiting. Mind you, some pubs - and here I'm particularly thinking about the well known Yew Tree - are museums in themselves. Seating outside at the front, with splendid views of the English Channel, consists of some long wooden benches and a rather higgledy - piggledy collection of tree trunks and stone slabs acting as tables and seats. There's no sun umbrellas, but these weren't needed on my visit. There's a grassy garden area to the right of the pub, but a notice warning that "the cockerel can be very unfriendly and is best avoided" appeared to have discouraged anyone from using it. There's outside toilets, but in a modernised block. Food consists of home made pasties and pies, served on flimsy paper plates, whilst stocks last. I'm going to do my grumpy old man bit now. When large swathes of Dorset's beaches are off limits to dogs in the summer months, I find it incomprehensible, in a pub like this with narrow corridors and not a lot of room at any time, particularly when busy, that a customer is allowed to bring into the pub a dog that is basically not much smaller than a Shetland pony, as was the case on my visit. Thankfully, most other customers were more accommodating and sensibly left their mutts outside. Beer is served direct from the barrel from the small room at the end of the corridor to customers who queue in the corridor at busy times. Given the lack of space, this can give a degree of intimacy to proceedings. Beers on were Palmers Copper Ale and Dorset Gold at £ 3.00p and £ 3.10p respectively. Downtons Chockwork Orange ( 5.8% - notably, also £ 3.10p ) ran out during my visit, but was a non-starter as I had the car. There's also a good selection of hand pressed ciders available. This was a very memorable visit and you really should try and get here if you haven't already been.