Manor House Hotel, Dronfield

This lovely old building is basically a hotel with a cafe bar in the foyer and a bar doubling as the reception desk. To be fair, it is clearly used as a pub, as I wasn't the only drinker at the time of my early afternoon visit. There's just one hand pump on the bar, with Abbeydale Moonshine on. There are bare stone walls, bare floorboards and some background music which my notes at the time describe as "pretty awful". Or perhaps that was meant to refer to the whole visit. Date of visit: 11th December 2017

This is a newish place with a café bar area to the left and a more pubby area to the right. Whilst mid-range food, cakes, wine and coffee are the order of the day here there was a solitary ale available in the shape of Abbeydale Moonshine which was in good form and £1.45 a half, not a bad price for the area. Service was polite but icily detached. Modern interior décor-style; the bar area has a lot of exposed stone, whilst the cafe part is more regimented like a Habitat catalogue along with a couple of bits of modern art to peruse. The clientele were mainly small children with the odd accompanying adult thrown in. Bland feminine-tinged muzak playing which I suppose wasn’t exactly at odds with the surroundings. It makes a good fist of being a middle-class cafe bar and if they serve a decent local ale, then fair does.

The Manor House is a stone built pub that is just down the hill from the Blue Stoops. This was the first pub i found open in Dronfield after passing 7 pubs that had'nt opened. Once inside there was an L shaped room the front area is more like a coffee and cake type place and this area was quite busy with people drinking coffee and eating,the bar area is to the right and this room extends to the rear of the building,the room had comfortable leather bench seats with a beamed ceiling and stone walls. There were no real ales on here and the two keg bitters were Theakston best which i had a drink of and this was a pretty poor drink the other beer was John Smiths smooth crap. This was a nice enough pub to have a drink in but was let down by having no real ales on. Pub visited 24/3/2012