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The White Horse Inn

“Sixteenth-century inn on the ancient market square”

LOCATION

CLUN, SHROPSHIRE

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Our View

In A Shropshire Lad, the poet A E Housman called Clun the ‘Quietest place under the sun’. That was in 1896, but here in the beautiful Shropshire Hills, this gloriously unspoilt and unpretentious village inn with beams, aged wood and stone floors, still has huge charm. Claiming to be 'South Shropshire's premier real ale pub', the main bar is its heart and has three brews of its own, Citadel, Clun Pale and Loophole, while others from the county’s many craft breweries complete the line-up. To the rear is a games room with pool table and dartboard. A variety of home-made, farmhouse-style food, sourced from very local suppliers, includes traditional suet puddings – a speciality – venison and red wine casserole; and parmesan and dill-crusted salmon, and a typical dessert of apple, Calvados and sultana crumble. Topside of beef is served on Sundays, with lamb, pork and chicken in rotation; for vegetarians there's a tasty nut roast. Regular events taking place here include live music, pool and poker nights, and the three-day Clun Valley Beer Festival on the first weekend in October. If you like poetry you can read some poems in the bar, and a surprisingly clean limerick, written about the White Horse.

The White Horse Inn

The Square, Clun, Shropshire, SY7 8JA

Phone: 01588 640305

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Discover Shropshire

Perhaps nowhere else in England will you find a county so deeply rural and with so much variety as Shropshire. Choose a clear day, climb to the top of The Wrekin, and look down on that ‘land of lost content’ so wistfully evoked by A E Housman. Peer through your binoculars and trace the course of Britain’s longest river as the Severn sweeps through the county, from the Breidden Hills to Wyre Forest, slicing Shropshire in two. To the north is a patchwork of dairy fields, hedgerows, copses and crops, broken at intervals by rugged sandstone ridges such as Grinshill or Nesscliffe, and dissected by a complex network of canals.

Spilling over the border into neighbouring Cheshire and North Wales is the unique meres and mosses country, with serenely smooth lakes glinting silver, interspersed with russet-tinged expanses of alder-fringed peat bog, where only the cry of the curlew disturbs the silence. South of the Severn lies the Shropshire Hills AONB. It’s only when you walk Wenlock Edge that you fully discover what a magical place it is – glorious woods and unexpectedly steep slopes plunge to innumerable secret valleys, meadows, streams and farmhouses, all tucked away, invisible from the outside world.